How to rank high on Google in 2018
The internet is expanding and offering more than it ever has and it's easier than ever to get your own personal website. Whether that's for personal use, recreational, or to bolster the image of your company - its easy to get one now, but simply having a website isn't enough anymore. Now, it's all about one thing: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In the past, you had a leg up just having a website. Search engines like Google made it easy to get visitors to your site with the use of keywords and with a whole lot less sites to choose from it was pretty easy to find yours at the top of the search engines within a short period of time. Fast forward to today, and there are hundreds of millions of websites. How do you overthrow that business with a 4.8 star rating at the top of Google and get a spot right there beside it as a newly web-friendly company? You do so through a robust SEO plan. SIMPLE SEO BASICS
Optimizing your website is the first thing you look at when you're creating a gameplan to get it listed higher. There are hundreds of places to find the general tips and tricks to the simple side of SEO, so for now we'll just list them so we can get to the real meat. Here are some things that we use for our website to help us rank as "search friendly:"
- Correct search term tags - web design houston, graphic artist in houston, how to make a website, etc..
- Properly formatted page titles with the subject, city, and business name ( Ranking high on Google | Pashia Designs | Houston )
- Engaging page descriptions: " Stand out among the competition. Get a professional logo & website for your business from the best graphic designers around: Pashia Designs."
- Speed at which the website loads (images should be compressed to the smallest size possible) before uploaded to the site
- Images are properly tagged with what they contain (helps for image searches)
- Website is registered with Google and Bing - Google prefers sites that are partnered over ones that aren't since they have more information about your business and its trustworthiness
RANKING HIGH IS MORE THAN SIMPLE SEO
With the ease and simplicity of getting websites came a lack of truly good and engaging content. With so many irrelevant websites for every possible search term, search engines like Google and Bing have changed their ways of wading through all the trash to get to the gold. The days of simply ranking websites by whichever has the most clicks are gone. Search engines want to know which websites are genuinely interesting and one way that they do that is by looking at how much content your website has and how relevant that content is to the person searching.
CONTENT: THE MORE THE MERRIER
If you look at the average website it'll have two things: a domain and a homepage. Unfortunately, most businesses don't have much more than this. Now, it's always better to have a basic site than to not have one, but to truly reap the benefits of that site and get business from it you need more. You need content. Genuine, authentic content. And we don't mean copy and pasting long blocks of text from other sites. Search engines work by looking at the likelihood that a person will be interested in your content. The more you have the higher that likelihood goes. Instead of simply listing out your services that your business offers, try investing in creating separate service pages which detail out exactly what that service does for your customer. To expand on that, you can also create "How-To" pages which are heavily searched for. For example, a concrete business would want to break down all the subcategories of their concrete services. There might be a crushed concrete page, a concrete delivery page, and a concrete mixing page. One page would explain exactly what concrete was and the process of creating it. A great website would go even further to explain the entire process as well - from its creation to its application for the customer and how to take care of it afterwards. More content will allow you to cast a larger net for a larger audience.
CONTENT: FAQ PAGES & BLOGS
Tons of the top searches are now people looking for an answer to their question. There's no better way to get your website up in the list for times like these than creating a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions page) or a blog that goes in more depth. For FAQs, focus on what your business offers and list your most common customer questions in the way real customers ask them. Don't be politically correct or overly fancy. The more questions you respond to with genuinely helpful answers, the higher chance you'll start getting featured on Google's new instant-content blurbs above the actual search results and that's never a bad thing. For blogs, create content that is relevant to your audience and slowly expand on those topics to include a wider audience. The more interesting and helpful topics the better!
If you need our services to help you rank higher on the search engines, go here!
For more tips, check out our last blog: 5 Simple Tricks to Modernize Any Website
Eric Pashia
Lead Web Designer