How Can I Make My Site Rank Higher?

It’s one of those questions; takes half a minute to ask and a complete life time to answer.

Other such questions might include:

How did we get here?

What is the offside rule?

Does my bum look big in this?

What makes this 9 syllable muttering so mischievous is that there is no quick, fast or completely accurate answer. There are instead; combinations, equations and manipulations that work together to form a raft upon which your website can float safely to more preferrable rankings.

Let me give you an introduction to some of the many factors that can help with your rankings, but firstly, lets take a step back and think about keywords.

Keyword Strategy: What keywords do you want to rank for? What keywords do your target audience use when searching? In order for your website to succeed in any way, shape or form, it needs to deliver in content what your audience is searching for by keyword.

Content: Give your online audience and search engines what they are looking for; high quality, useful and timely content. Keep your content fresh, powered by regular keyword research. Engage your user, offer value and place yourself apart from the competition. Google want’s to deliver accurate, meaningful search engine results pages when users search; help it out by adopting some of the following methodologies to associate your content and websites with keywords, so Google can deliver it to your audience once demand surfaces.

Title Tags: Your title tag is the text that describes the purpose and meaning of your individual content pages. Craft the Title Tags of your page using your keywords for SEO without stuffing or spamming. Be accurate. Concise. Stick to a 70 Character limit. Compose with your audience in mind.

Meta Descriptions: These teeny tiny windows to your website offer you a 150-160 character opportunity to advertise the content that can be found on your page. More than signalling the nature of your content to search engines, Meta Descriptions work to encourage your target audience to click. Without a meta description, search engines will deliver content scraped from your webpage. Take control, make wise use of your keywords for SEO and make your target audience want your content.

H1 Tags: The H1 tag is the heading on your page, i.e. How Can I Make My Site Rank Higher? Use the H1 to reinforce the relevancy and purpose of your content, craft it with your keywords for SEO which will be fuelling your content and give your audience a H1 which informs and engages.

What about off the page?

External Linking: The volume of high quality websites and pages that link to your own website and pages is widely regarded as one of the most important factors in SEO in terms of gaining high rankings. Pages with the most external links pointing towards them are deemed to be the most trustworthy and rewarded with the crowning glory of higher search engine rankings.

But not just any old external link will do; oh no. External links need to be a number of things:

• From a trusted domain
• From a page that is popular and established
• Link from relevant content to relevant content
• The anchor text used in the ad

Anchor Text: Anchor Text is the practice of using keywords to make up a hyperlink as opposed to a web page address i.e learn more about Google Instant. In this case, the anchor text and keyword is Google Instant.

Anchor text is the tool you can use to make the most out of external links, essentially; anchor text is how you tell your audience and search engines about the nature of your pages that external links are linking to.

Use your keywords for SEO in your anchor text when appropriate to link to relevant pages of content for improved rankings.

Now you have a systematic approach to content creation and external link generation with strategic anchor text, you need to think about internal link building.

It’s very late, I’m very tired and as my eyeballs close beneath their own weight, you’ll find more information on internal linking tomorrow.

Goodnight Chaps.

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