Google Ranking
How relevant is your website?
Google Ranking on Search Results
As we all know, the higher a website is ranked on Google, the more potential eyeballs will see your products and/or service offerings.
When a potential client searches Google with a string of keywords, Google bots then crawl millions of web sites and ranks their relevancy based on the the search term or phrase. By including these keywords in your body of text (be sure to have more than 450 words on a page) Google will hopefully include your site as one of the first ten “organic” responses to the search. Depending on the type of business you are classified as, the requirement of word count could be higher. Update site content regularly as Google views this as an indicator of relevancy.
Google Adwords provides tools to allow you to research the most relevant keywords related to your business. Integrating these keywords into your website will help your site appear across a variety of search requests.
Remember, it is all about Content, Content, Content! Google Ranking wants, needs and requires great original content!
Is your site User Friendly?
Your website should be easy to use, navigate, fast to load, have great content to get the best Google Ranking.
Google Analytics on your site will allow you to measure performance and “bounce rate” or the number of times people come to your site and leave without looking around, clicking around and reading your content.
You want a low bounce rate and lots of return visitors who use your site as a reference or can “share” your site to other users through social media. These are all indicators of a loyal visitor base.
Do you have good Meta Tags/Meta Data?
Meta tags or Meta data is informational programming in the web site that is not displayed on the page. You can view a website’s source code by right clicking on the page and selecting “View Page Source”. This allows you to see the actually HTML the page uses to display and control the elements of that specific page. Do this on my front page and you will see the following between the <head> </head> command code.
Much of this programming code is to appear relevant and to get ranking. At the very least, you need a good title, page description and keywords.
Web Site Security
What does it mean when we talk about security on a web site? It means the site has a “Certificate” issued by a reputable company who has vetted the site and determined it is a good site. (For a fee of course)
By having a certificate, the secure site is then identified by https://
Having a certificate shows the visitor that the information is encrypted and is “safe’ to use a credit card or other date without a breach of security. THIS IS NOT 100% FOOL PROOF! An expert hacker can get past the encryption.
Google does reward a site for having a certificate, even if it is not used for eCommerce.
Faster Sites = better ranking
A good Web Designer/Developer is always looking at was to increase the speed of loading the pages of a site. Nothing makes a customer turn away faster than a site that is slow to resolve and display everything. You have seconds to make a good impression or your visitor is gone.
Research ways to improve your Time to First Byte (TTFB). Your goal of front-end performance is to create a fast and responsive user experience. One speed goblin is the loading of large images, videos and background programs. If using WordPress, explore the cache plugins and be sure to keep your plugins light. Too many can increase your TTFB speed.
Is your site Trustworthy?
Three Trust indicators to Google and other search engines are:
- links to your site on other sites,
- frequency of mentions on social media and
- the length of time your visitors stay on your site.
Include SSL on all web pages within your website. This indicates to visitors your business has been authenticated by a service and is safe to visit.
In Closing
All these factors improve your Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) thereby increasing your organic ranking and traffic from searches in both Google and Bing. Also, try Digital Marketing!
