By: Dave Cooper, RackNerd

To have a successful web site it’s a good idea to think about how a user is going to interact with each page.

These include thinking about how many clicks it takes to get to information and the placement of links and images on each page.

In saying that it’s not what is in front of you that gets you a high ranking in search engines. Everybody wants a top-ranking and it doesn’t happen instantly. Let’s take Google, for example, their search indexing algorithm changes a lot this is to prevent users from manipulating search engine results. Google is looking for real sites with real helpful content. A site that is written well and has proper SEO attributes set are likely to come out on top.

Below are some, not all, tips on improving your website ranking.

Note: If you are using WordPress there are plenty of SEO plugins that will help you, however in this article, I will not be diving into SEO for WordPress, though I can recommend Beaver Builder SEO, this is my favorite SEO tool for WordPress, easy to understand and it will help you understand how SEO works, so give it a try.

Moving on…

1. Research Keywords

It’s important to implement relevant keywords, researching what keywords/phrases that are being used by people on the internet is important so you can adjust your keywords on each page which gives you the best chance of having your site show up in search results.

2. Page Titles

These need to be inline with the content of each page. This should also contain keywords that are in the meta keywords section of your page.

3. Description

The description should explain what your site is about, you need to be creative with this, it needs to be short and contain keywords in your keyword meta tags.

4. Alt Tags

A lot of designers forget to do this, but not adding alt tags to your site will cause you to have a lower ranking in search engine results. Alt tags are used for visually impaired users using screen readers. If you have a site that has great image descriptions search engines love this and so will the users using it 🙂

5. Sitemap

It’s important to create a sitemap of your site. The first thing a search bot uses to quickly identify all the sections of your site is a sitemap, you can generate one free from https://www.xml-sitemaps.com or if you’re using WordPress there are plenty of plugins to choose from.

6. Google Analytics

If you have not integrated Google Analytics to your site, it’s a must. This allows you to fine-tune your keywords, phrases, and descriptions to visually see how long users are staying on each page, what they click on, etc… This helps you to fine-tune your SEO. Don’t set and forget, it’s a constant battle to be number one in search results.

7. Website Speed

Make sure your site loads fast, if your site takes too long to load this can also cause you to drop down in search rankings, no one wants to wait for a site to load. Remember search engines want to give their end-users the best possible experience and quality results. There are some helpful websites out there that can test your web site loading times one of them is Pingdom. https://tools.pingdom.com

8. Search Engine Submission

Once all of the above is done submit your site to search engines.  I have listed the submission url for the most popular search engines. It’s important not to do this step if you have not completed the above. You don’t want search engines indexing pages when they are not complete because reindexing takes longer.

Submission URL’s:

Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome

Yahoo and Bing Website Tools: https://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

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