No matter what type of website or blog you have the key to success, and free highly targeted traffic, is to rank well on Google. In order to do this, you must understand the most important factors for good Google rankings, and for that Dynamics Digital is there to help you.
To start off with there are a few extremely basic aspects of how Google determines where your site will rank. This is sort of SEO 101, but if you do not know it then you need to learn it now. The first thing Google looks for is your relevant content. This means on-site SEO and keywords/keyphrases. A suggested keyword density is somewhere between 3%-5%, this is the number of times that your keyword is displayed on each page. Let Google know that your website is full of relevant information about whatever your desired search term is. Another, and possibly the most important, thing to recognize is that Google bases its search engine rankings largely around how valued your website is to others on the Internet. It measures this through backlinks or links from other sites not owned by you back to your site. The theory here is that if other people link to your site you must provide something useful. Because of this one of the easiest ways to improve your search engine rankings is to get a link back to your website on other people’s sites.
Now on to some of the not so common sense, and yet most important factors for good Google rankings.
– Be sure to use your keywords in many places. This includes the title of your website, your website’s URL (if possible), throughout the body of your website’s text, in your websites H1 or headline tag, and in META information such as the description and obviously keyword values. Make sure Google knows that your site is about your desired key phrase or keywords, this is the best way to go about it.
– Internal links are important too. Many webmasters focus solely on external backlinks, these are great and you should get as many as you can but it is not the whole picture. A great structure is to make sure that every page on your website links back to your main page. This helps Google to determine which page is the most important, or index page, for your website. If you have three or four static pages that are important (such as top category pages) build both internal and external links to these as well; if you rank well enough Google may display all of these in the search engine results. Just look at the way that WordPress blog is structured, this is a great example of proper internal linking.
– Relevance and quality of external sites linking to you. When building backlinks look for websites that are already of high authority, page rank is a great indicator of this. Also, look for websites that are relevant to yours. This means that if your website is about iPods then a backlink from a website about iPod news will be worth much more than a backlink from a site about yoga. While every backlink helps high quality and relevant links count for much more.
– Content is one of the most important factors in ranking well on Google. This is sort of a two-pronged factor. You need to have both regularly updating content and unique content. If your entire website is made up of duplicate content Google will penalize it by placing you further down in the search results. Also, sites that are regularly updated traditionally offer more information and are therefore automatically moved up in search engine rankings. The saying content is king comes from the absolute necessity to provide fresh and unique content.
– The age of your website is also very important. This does not mean domain, but rather when your site was launched. You will notice that a brand-new site will easily hit top rankings for a search term and then disappear for quite a while. Google tends to reward fresh websites with a quick burst but in the long run, the longer and better established your website is the better it will rank with the same amount of work done to a website that is not as aged. There is nothing you can really do for this point besides to continually update your site and wait.
Hopefully, you have learned a lot of new SEO tips and have learned about the most important factors to achieve good Google rankings. Keep these things in mind both for your existing website(s) and when building any future sites or blogs and you will be assured a great place at the top of Google.
