Ways to Improve your SEO Ranking

What Is SEO Ranking?

SEO ranking occurs on two levels; for human searchers, and for search engine bots. In order to optimize web pages best for bots, you need to take technical SEO and keyword placement into consideration. As SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information about products and services. For any given search, Google’s ranking results could incorporate features such as image results, video, smart snippets (a piece of the page being displayed directly on the SERP), as well as answer boxes (where information from multiple pages is automatically cobbled together to create a quick, easy resource for searchers). It becomes increasingly necessary to think like a bot, because any of the items listed above can account for high or low ranking.

SEO Rankings refer to where a website or webpage falls positionally on a SERP. For example, if your webpage is about insurance and you appear third in line on a SERP, you are ranked third. Effective SEO ranking is important, because nearly 92% of internet traffic is generated by sites listed on page one of the SERP, and almost 33% of traffic is received by the first search result (excluding paid traffic).

Four Ways to Improve your SEO Ranking

1.Have a link-worthy site

A webpage which is content-rich, authoritative, unbiased, and helps visitors learn more about what they are interested in is most likely to attract links from other websites, which improves your search engine optimization.

Improve your authority and credibility by adding relevant links within the text. Instead of having “click here” links, try writing out the name of the destination. “Click here” has no search engine value beyond the attached URL, whereas “Michigan Tech Enterprise Program” is rich with keywords and will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to. Always use descriptive links by linking keywords—it not only improves search engine optimization, but also adds value to your readers, including those with disabilities or who are using screen readers.

2.High-Quality Content

High-quality content is at the core of SEO ranking success. To attract search engines, you need to populate your website with content.

To start, ensure every page includes at least 300 words of original content. Search engines can detect duplicate content and may penalize your page for using copied content. Content should be broken into shorter chunks, for instance, with H2 subheadings, so it’s easy to scan.

Above all, content should meet Google’s EAT criteria: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Google introduced this terminology in 2018. EAT is particularly critical for sensitive topic matters, such as health care, science, and law.

Factors that boost an EAT score include citing respected experts (e.g., if you run a health care website, refer to medical professionals) and referring to reliable sources (such as “.edu” or “.gov” sites).

3. Effective Keywords

Keywords are a critical consideration for on-page optimization. Your content should include target keywords — basically, what words or phrases users might look for that would ideally lead them to your page.

Keywords tell the search engine what your page is about. In addition to a primary keyword for each page, it’s also good to have supporting secondary keywords.

Keywords are also important beyond the actual webpage content. You should create a meta title and meta description for every page, for example. This brief page title and description are listed in the SERP. Again, this is just a quick primer to why keywords matter and how you can make them work for you. Our keyword research tools can help.

Start with our Keyword Overview tool, where you’ll get a comprehensive look at the particular query you’re targeting — including total search volume, how competitive the space is, and key SERP features. As effective keywords will help to improve the SEO ranking

4. Load Speed

The digital world has come a long way since it first became available to the general public. The days of waiting impatiently for dial-up connections are long gone. Your webpage construction should reflect that.

Top-positioned Google sites average a load time of fewer than 3 seconds. For ecommerce websites, 2 seconds is considered the threshold of acceptability. According to Google webmasters, Google aims for less than a half-second. And with the latest Page Experience Update almost here, it’s important to work on improving page speed.

Search engine bots can estimate site speed based on your page’s HTML code. Google also taps into Chrome browser user data to get insights into loading speed. You can do several things to speed up your website, such as minimizing HTTP requests, minifying and combining files, and using asynchronous loading for JavaScript and CSS files.

Server response time is another issue to tackle. A domain name system (DNS) server holds a database of IP addresses. When someone enters a URL into their browser, the DNS server translates that URL to the relevant IP address. It’s like the computer is looking up a number in the phonebook.

Just how long this takes depends on the speed of your DNS provider. Check out DNS speed comparison reports to see how yours stacks up