5 Easy Steps to Rank Your Website
You know which is the most popular search engine? You guessed it right – Google. It holds the highest search engine market share handling more than 5.4 billion searches each day. Getting your website on the first page of search engines is extremely important for your business to succeed online.
About 90% of people never check beyond the first page of Google. The first position takes about 40% traffic! Top rankings in search engine result pages not only help your website gain quality traffic but also impart trust and credibility among the users. But getting into the top slots is never easy – the competition is severe. Like you, your competitors are also doing their best to rank on the first page.
So, if you are looking to be positioned at top slots in organic search results, you should know the factors that Google takes into account when ranking your website. You know what; there are more than 200 ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. And Google never reveals what they are.
But, industry experts like SEO Company Toronto have proven that some work. Some are controversial and many are just speculation. So, what you need to consider enabling your website rank in the first page? The simple answer is, you need to think like Google while it ranks a particular website.
So, here are the most important factors Google considers while ranking websites.
1. Conduct thorough keyword research
Before you start doing anything, you need know what keywords your target audience is using to search for the products/services you offer. SEO Company Toronto can help you find the keywords with good search frequencies and that can rank easily. Experienced SEO Toronto consultant will figure out the best keywords and the competition for each keyword. Based on the search frequency and the competition, you need to finalize the keywords that you need to target to rank.
Some tools can help you find the keyword search frequencies but most of them are not reliable. Your SEO Toronto consultant can get the data directly from Google and manually check for the competition of each keyword, or you may use tools such as SEMrush and Moz.
2. Create good content
Content is king when it comes to search engine rankings. The better your content is, the better you have chances to rank. There is no short cut (period)! So, once you have decided which keywords you are planning to target, you need to create the content based on them. You need to make sure that content is engaging and useful for your users while making sure that keywords are optimized properly in the content.
You cannot just stuff keywords in the content – you need to make sure that keywords are inserted in a way they sound natural both to users as well as search engines. This requires copywriting skill honed over years. It is always better to take help of SEO Toronto consultant with good copywriting and SEO skills.
3. Take care of on-page errors
You need to make sure that your website is free from all on-page errors. On-page optimization is nothing but making sure that your website is made easy for the search engine bots to crawl and understand the contents of it. There are many on-page factors to make your website search-engine friendly. This includes but not limited to meta titles and descriptions, image optimization, search engine friendly URLs, internal linking, identifying crawl errors, finding broken links, etc.
It is always advised to take the help of professional web design Toronto consultants as they do this day in and day out. They will take care of these on-page things pretty quickly while making sure they adhere to search engine guidelines.
4. Build quality backlinks
The incoming links to your website from relevant, authority sites is a major ranking factor. Google considers these links as votes to your website and the more quality links your website has the better it will rank in the search engines. One thing you need to be aware of here is link building is not just blindly getting links to your website. There was a time when Google used to just consider the number of links to a website while ranking. But with the recent updates, it now is considering the links from decent websites only.
The quality of links is more important today. Today, it is not about building links – it is about earning links from quality sites. The backlink profile of your website should look natural to Google. You need to have links from a variety of sources, a mix of do-follow and no-follow links, and links from relevant sites.
Remember, low-quality link building can actually hamper your rankings and may even lead to Google’s manual penalty – your website will disappear from the search rankings altogether.
5. Improve page speed and make website mobile friendly
Would you like to wait for ages for a website to open? No right. Nobody likes slow loading websites. Internet users are very busy, they won’t wait. Google knows this well. So it gives importance to websites that load quickly. Many factors hinder the loading speed of a website including image size, coding and all. Web design Toronto experts can help you fix all these and can help your website load quickly.
And it is needless to say that many people today are using their smartphones to browse the Internet. The content on your website should be easy to consume from any type of device, irrespective of the screen size. So, responsive websites are very important these days. If your website is not compatible in multiple devices, you are losing your rankings.
Focus on these basic, yet important factors and you are sure to achieve good rankings in search engines. You will not be able to take care of all these things without proper SEO expertise. So, leave it to our experts and be rest assured that your website is ranking and you are reaping the benefits.