19 February 2013
We get asked this question a lot so I thought I would summarise the key things you should be doing to score higher in the Google rankings for your keywords.
Google is looking to give the end user the best experience possible, meaning each search ends with a satisfactory result as quickly as possible. This is how they stay #1 search engine. To do this, they want to be serving up good results. When they are looking at your site, they are trying to answer these questions:
- What your site is “about”? What are they key words associated with it?
- Do it behave well, does it load fast, does it render correctly?
- Is the content ‘good’? Do people stay on it long? Do they share it on their social network profiles?
Here’s how you can improve on all those things.
1. Inbound links
An inbound link is a link to your website from another website.
The absolute number one thing you should be doing is getting popular, respectable sites, that are related to your business to link to you. Why?
- Sites that have lots of inbound links themselves and score well on other SEO factors are deemed credible, so a link from them is worth much more than a link from a smaller site.
- Links from sites that have related or complimentary content to your business will help Google figure out what your site is about. If you are a law firm, you should try get sites that are constantly writing about legal issue to link to you. Ultimately this comes down to online PR.
Do not pay for links or be tempted in to ‘link building networks’, these are easily recognisable by Google as spammy and you will be penalised.
Instead, spend some time guest blogging for sites in your subject area so that you can get a link back to your site.
The text of the inbound link (called anchor text) is important because this will also be used by Google as an indicator of what your site is about. So try get relevant anchor text, for example if someone were to link to this post for me they could use ‘Get Your Site Higher On Google’ as the text in the link to this post, there is then a high chance it will start ranking better when people type ‘Get Your Site Higher On Google’ in to Google, again this is because Google uses other resources on the internet to tell it about your site.
The classic example of this is the search “click here”. The number one result is Adobe Reader! Even though they don’t optimise for “click here”. This is because so many sites on the internet link to Abobe with the text “click here to download Abobe Reader” when they have PDFs on their site. So it’s nothing to do with the onsite content of the Adobe site.
2. Social media activity
Recent changes in Google’s algorithms mean that this is now also the absolute number one thing you should be doing. Producing fresh content and getting that shared across your key social networks will bring you up the rankings. Why? Because Google realises that if real world people are sharing content on their profiles, you must be saying something useful or interesting. They will put you high in the results because you seem to be producing good content.
Publish helpful posts on an interesting subject area to one or more social networks. If it’s genuinely insightful there is a good chance people will share it.
Don’t just spam them with a blog post on your recent offering or the latest firm news. Sadly unless you are a huge firm most people won’t care about this. You should only promote your own service after you have published a series of relevant and useful posts that serve to build your credibility.
It is important to consider which social network you should be building a presence on. Facebook is good for B2C but perhaps not so good for B2B. LinkedIn is a good way to market with your professional contacts. Twitter is great for both.
3. Fresh content
So what are you going to post or tweet?
Good quality, fresh content, on your area of expertise. Focus your blog on a particular topic and write regular insightful posts that help other people
The first reason this is great is because it forms part of a good content marketing strategy, in which you produce high quality trust building content that demonstrates your expertise so that people come to you for your service or recommend you.
The second benefit is that you will score higher on Google because you are naturally using your main key terms and using terms related to your industry.
Stale websites are a big put off for Google, so the third benefit is that your dynamic website with regular new content will be more appealing to their algorithms.
4. Onsite SEO
This is the one that people come to us before, it is to do with:
- Ensuring all page code is valid
- Ensuring URLs have relevant keywords, for example, the end of this page URL is …/the-4-basics-of-getting-your-site-higher-on-google
- Setting a relevant page title (the bit that appears in the tab bar)
- Ensuring images have ‘alt’ tags
- Using h1, h2 and paragraph tags correctly in your copy
- Fast page loading times
A good content management system should do this for you.
Summary
Again, this all comes back to how Google is improving the end user experience. They want people to find the content they need as quick as possible, to do this you need to help them figure out:
- What your site is “about”? What are they key words associated with it>
- Do it behave well, does it load fast, does it render correctly?
- Is the content ‘good’? Do people stay on it long? Do they share it on their social network profiles?
If you want any further advice please email me at alex@wemakewebsites.com
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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.
