Easy Steps to Rank in Search Engine Results Pages

With the world moving to online more and more each day, we cannot express enough how important it is to get your website ranking well on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). There are over 1 billion websites out there and out of those websites, you want yours to be seen by clients and perspective clients.

Unfortunately, many people are unsure of the technicalities behind the steps taken to get your website ranking on Google. At Online Innovations, our team is constantly keeping abreast of the industry news, such as new rules or guidelines set by search engines, particularly Google. By keeping up with the industry news and updates, we are able to make sure that your website ranks well.

If you’re a beginner to the World Wide Web, take a look at some of the easy steps to take to kick-start your search engine ranking:

8 Simple Steps to Kick-start your Ranking

1. Website design – The design of your website is an important ranking factor. Your website needs to be modern, stylish and user-friendly so that users can easily navigate through the content pages and find the information that they’re looking for.

2. Create Google accounts – The more presence you have in Google’s various apps, the more presence you will have in Google’s pages. Google My Business allows your business to show up on Maps, in search and even Google+. It also gives people the information they’re looking for on-the-go, such as contact details and operating hours. Google Analytics for your website reports and Google Search Console for monitoring your website’s performance in the search index are both accounts that every website owner should have in order to make ranking in the results pages easier.

3. Keywords – When writing the content for your website, the first step you need to take is to identify the keywords that you want to be searched for on search engines and then find the ones that are the most searched for. Thereafter, add these keywords to the relative content on your website so that when they’re searched for, your website will rank in the search engine pages. Finding out the level of competition for your keywords is a helpful deciding factor on which keywords are worth using.

4. Keyword grouping – Once you have decided on the primary keywords you want to include in your website content, choose some variations of that keyword so that you can create one page of authority content for each keyword group. For example, if your primary keyword is “website design” and your authority content page is about website design, choose variations such as “website design specialists” and “website design in south africa” to use in the metas and body of the content.

5. Keywords in your Meta data – A vital step to take in order to rank well in the search engines is to pay close attention to your Meta data and to make sure that each Meta title, Meta description, URL and page heading contains variations of your primary keywords for each page.

6. Meta data – Another point we need to get across about Meta data is that each page’s Meta title and description needs to be unique and descriptive. If your Meta data is duplicated across 2 or more pages, Google will only be able rank one of the pages as it will recognise them as duplicate content.

7. Home page and navigation – You need to keep your website user-friendly by making it easy for users to navigate to other content pages on the site. Link directly from the home page or your navigation menu to your best and strongest content pages.

8. Compatibility – When it comes to the development of your website, make sure to hire a developer who will develop your website so that it loads properly in different internet browsers and displays correctly on all screen resolutions. These are factors that need to be taken into account before taking your website live, as they count towards where Google will rank you.