Positioning your business to rank higher on Google sounds daunting to someone starting a website for the first time.
However, that’s mostly due to the fancy jargon. The basics of Google positioning actually aren’t that complicated.
Ranking higher isn’t about writing in a weird language or putting enough keywords in the article.
In fact, those things might hurt you. It is instead about recognizing the topics that people are searching for and picking the right one to get their attention.
By following these steps, beginners at Google ranking can expect to gain traffic from Google.
Write About What People Care About
Every day, people are searching Google for solutions to problems and answers to questions. Your goal is to position your content into the conversation about those problems and answers.
To get started, you’ll need to have a way to track the topics that people are searching for, which are called keywords.
SEO Book’s Keyword Suggestion Tool is an easy tracker to use. Enter your subject into the tool. Then, you’ll see a neat list of related phrases and the number of daily and monthly searches they get.
You can then cross-check the results with the total number of searches for the topic on Google.
If your phrase gets a high number of daily searches and has 10 million or less total results on Google, you have a good chance of ranking on the first page for it, since competitors probably won’t be as specific as your content will be.
Don’t Neglect Images
While Google doesn’t disclose the data, a significant percentage of its searches, perhaps as much as a third, are image searches.
Because Google often presents related images on the pages of its web search results, having a high ranking image on your site is a great way to get traffic.
To begin making the most of your image optimization, you should upload your file with the keywords or phrases in the name. For example, “Roman-Gladiator.jpg” will do much better in image searches than “egjudhcncjpg.”
Once your image is uploaded, make sure that its alternate text (which can be edited either in web software such as WordPress or in HTML) is related to your keywords or phrases. If possible, put your image above and below content that contains the keywords or phrases.
There’s much more to it than this, but it’s a good way to get started.
Keyword Density
In the early days of SEO, webmasters would stuff their content full of as many keywords as possible to rank high.
Those days are long gone and Google will now penalize anyone who does it.
Modern SEO isn’t about keyword stuffing, but creating content people will want to share and link to.
Your keywords instead should flow naturally in sentences crafted for readers, not search engine bots. This is the best way for people to like and share your content, which is ultimately the way that Google determines your site’s importance.
To avoid having Google think that you’re keyword stuffing, never have your keywords be more than 1% of your total text.
Improve your Google Positioning
While these are the basic steps that can help those new to Google positioning grow their sites and businesses, generating search engine growth can take time and be a tedious effort
If you’d like the help of a team of experienced professionals who specialize in growing the presence of businesses on Google, contact us.