How to improve ranking on Google and other search engines?
This guide covers all aspects of optimizing and ranking a website on Google.
You can use it as a starting point for planning an effective web marketing campaign.
This activity will significantly affect the visibility of your personal or business website.
Define your business
To start a successful web marketing campaign, you must start not with the search engines but with your website, your products and services, and most importantly, your customers.
An incorrect way to approach the problem of Google ranking, but one that many people do, is to ‘seed’ the web with backlinks or links to the site without doing any kind of investigation into the products and services, to whom they are offered and in what way.
Moreover, this is not a natural and progressive ranking of a website over time, Google notices and does not reward you.
First point is therefore to identify what your website offers and to whom.
Action: list the main products and services you offer and identify the typical customer.
Set the goals of your marketing campaign.
What do you hope to achieve with a web marketing campaign?
Increase awareness of your brand?
Increase orders?
Increase traffic to your website?
In the case of a physical store, a local business, increase visits to the store?
Whatever the goal you set and the budget you have, you need to set a campaign cost commensurate with the result you want to achieve.
For this reason you should have a rough idea of the value of achieving your business goals.
For example in the case of increasing traffic to your company website, set a rough value for each new visitor to your site.
It is easier to make this estimate in the case of selling a product or service, the value of a sale being more simply quantifiable.
- Action: estimate the value that each new visitor to your site might have for you.
- Action: estimate a number of new visitors you wish to attract to the site.
- Action: these two estimates should set an upper budget limit regarding your web marketing campaign.
Convert your business definitions into keywords for search
Choosing the keywords by which potential customers search Google for your products and services is a key part of any web marketing and search engine ranking campaign.
Think about how your site can be defined, what differentiates it from your competitors.
What keywords define your content, your service, your geographic location, potential users and their interests.
Make a list of words and phrases that describe your service.
Go to Google and test individual keywords to see what kind of results are returned.
View the sites of major competitors in your product area and look for useful words in the text of their pages.
Use useful tools you find on the Internet such as the Google ADS Adwords keyword planning tool or similar.
- Action: create a list of keywords and search phrases that reflect the main themes of your business.
- Action: use online tools to refine the list.
Structuring the site around search phrases
Website structure is important.
Separate content into clearly defined pages and sections that represent the most important themes of your site and associate them with search phrases.
Draw a map of your site, with the pages divided into sections.
To each page assign a title that reflects the search terms for that content.
This map can serve as the basis for the site.
Try not to bury content too deeply into the site.
Create navigation links that minimize the number of clicks required to get from one page to another.
Make sure that no page is more than two clicks away from any other.
Add a site map with links to each page.
These measures will make it easier for search engine spiders and visitors to find all your pages.
If your site contains unrelated information, such as because the site is used for two or more separate businesses, split it into separate domains.
If your site offers services to users in different countries, consider separating it into target country-specific domains.
This will make targeting search engines and directories easier.
- Action: map out your site with sections and page titles that reflect your search phrases.
- Action: use this map as the basis for your site.
- Action: structure your site pages to minimize the number of clicks between them.
- Action: add a site map for visitors and search engine spiders.
- Action: register separate domains for different types of products.
- Action: consider registering country-specific domains for the benefit of foreign users.
Design your pages to attract search engine traffic
These guidelines when designing a website are intended to increase the likelihood that a page will be relevant to a particular search key, but they are also functional for users because they make your pages more readable.
Sorry, but now I have to speak in unavoidable technical language, but if that’s not your job, you can pass these suggestions on to the webmaster in charge of your site.
From a technical point of view, you need to plan an optimization on the website code starting with the page headers must contain a TITLE tag and a DESCRIPTION meta-tag.
The TITLE tag is very important for the visibility of a page.
It has a direct effect on the ranking of a page since this text will be presented in search results.
Make it short and relevant.
Use words that reflect the theme of the page (thus the keyword) and will make your title stand out.
Point as a reference to headlines, express a concept, get to the point with a few but clear words.
Also avoid using your business name on all pages.
Use the meta-tag DESCRIPTION, because by default this definition will show up in the results of many search engines.
You have about 150 characters so that it will not be truncated by search engines.
Make it interesting, repeat the TITLE and expand the search phrase you are using for that page.
Overuse of the search key in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags is self-defeating and will likely dilute your site’s ranking.
As for the text on the page, the first content that appears should be a reiteration of the TITLE.
Follow up with a repetition of the DESCRIPTION and then by the text describing the main theme of the page.
For all search engines, the use of relevant text is essential.
If you keep your pages on topic, excessive keyword repetition should not be necessary, although it is important that search keywords and synonyms appear frequently in your text.
When linking to one page to another on your site, use the TITLE of the page as the link text.
Relevance of links is important to search engines, and this trick helps to strengthen the relevance of the page to search terms.
Images are important to search engines; use the ALT tag to associate each image with relevant text.
Do not use frames. Some indexing spiders will ignore your frames anyway and highlight the message “your browser does not support frames.”
Avoid excessive use of JavaScript.
It makes a page harder for search engines to decipher. Put your code in a separate file if you use JavaScript.
Use style sheets to determine the appearance of your text.
This trick makes for a cleaner page source and makes a difference in site maintenance, as well as making it easier for search engines to work with.
Apply these guidelines to all pages on your site.
If you already have a site, undertaking a major design may take time and resources. Seek professional advice on costs before committing to major changes.
In the first instance, you may prefer to focus on optimizing a few pages until you have concrete results on the effectiveness of the above approach.
Also, avoid tampering with the content of existing pages that already bring traffic to the site through search engines or through other external links.
- Action: use the keyword in the TITLE tag.
- Action: use the DESCRIPTION tag to provide a summary of the page content.
Action: repeat the TITLE concepts at the top of the page.
Action: repeat the concepts of the DESCRIPTION in the first paragraph.
Action: use the TITLE text to link the page with others on your site.
Action: add the ALT tag if you use images.
Action: do not use frames.
Action: avoid excessive use of JavaScript; use a file.
Action: use a style sheet.
Action: if you already have a site, consider the cost of a total or partial redesign.
Action: be careful about modifying or removing pages that already bring in traffic.
Submit your site to directories and search engines.
Before submitting your site to search engines or any directories, make sure that the TITLE and DESCRIPTION of your home page reflect the most important search terms for your business.
Submit the file containing your site map, sitemap.xml file to the major search engines.
In addition to submitting, it is also recommended to create a link to the new site from an already indexed page of an existing site.
The use of automated submission services is limited.
This is because the engines are developing strategies to prevent automated, generalized submissions of new Web pages.
Important are pay-per-click services, such as Google AdWords or as it is now called Google ADS, which charges advertisers for clicks from searches for certain keywords.
The optimization process does not provide immediate results, so for certain keywords that are very important to your business it may be important to set up a Google ADS advertising campaign.
Improving your Google ranking is not an easy or even immediate task.
- Action: review the TITLE and DESCRIPTION of the home page.
- Action: submit site map to search engines.
- Action: create links to the new site from existing sites.
- Action: consider creating a Google Ads campaign.
Get links from sites in the same industry
Identify other sites that offer complementary services to yours and that might interest your users and mention them in your content and inspire them to reciprocate.
Do this with more popular sites, those that appear at the top of searches that use the keywords you are targeting.
Action: search for complementary sites that might be willing to link to pages on your site.
Monitor results
Check the position of your pages on the major search engines for your most important keywords.
Also check the coverage of your site, that is, the number of pages indexed on the major search engines.
The command to check the number of indexed pages is.
Site:www.nomwdeltuodominio.it
Use Google’s Search Console to index a new page on your site,
- Action: check how your pages rank for the main search keys for your business on the different search engines.
- Action: measure your site’s indexing on search engines.
- Action: check the logs to see which search engines are sending you traffic.
If you apply all the tips I have provided, your website’s Google ranking will only improve.
Let me know in the comments what you think and if you have any doubts, ask me questions – I’ll be happy to answer them.
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