How to Rank Higher on Google in 2023: 10 SEO Tips To Lead
Most site owners and business owners wish to rank their sites on the first page of search engines such as (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu: China’s most popular search engine, Yandex.ru used widely in Russia), they want their web pages to get noticed and visited, this task has however proved difficult as most of their pages are not seen on the first pages of google, this article outlines 10 SEO tips that would make your websites rank high on Google in 2023.
What is SEO?
SEO(search engine optimization) is a system of styling a website to accurately point to the search engines what information the given website possesses, in order for pages to rank higher on search engines and boost traffic to optimized pages.
SEO STATS
1. On the first search engine page alone, the first organic page accounts for 67.60% of all clicks.
2 57% of B2B marketers stated that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative.
3. Hubspot confirms that “57% of B2B marketers states that SEO generates more leads than any other marketing initiative.
Google SEO Guidelines
In 2000 Google began publishing its SEO guidelines, the founders were more interested in providing quality searches to users, rather than serving businesses that create websites.
list of their Guidelines
- Google rewards sites with well-thought-out content.
- Good site architecture
- Optimized web content
- A strong on-page and off-page optimization.
- External influences
Goals of a Website owner
- Site owners want to get their webpages to the top of the Search engine result page (SERP).
- They want their webpages to get noticed and people should visit them if they are on the top of the SERP, not only that to create traffic that converts(Getting users to take a specific action, by clicking on something).
- Search engines make use of web crawler bots to crawl along links on the internet and index information on web pages they found.
- Bots crawl to webpages and analyze the Meta descriptions, keywords, and other characteristics to evaluate the page, making use of the complex algorithm.
- Info about the page’s contents and perceived value is indexed in larger databases.
- The search engine bots use their database to choose which pages will provide the most relevant and valuable information for a user’s search query.
- SEO is now different from its 1990s focus on keywords and links
- It involves a collection of on-page and off-page SEO techniques that must be regularly to climb to the top of the SERP and remain there.
- Rankings change when other sites get updated
Why You should Implement SEO?
1 Your competitors may have better content than yours(more pages, more posts).
2 Improper usage of keywords.
3 Poor link building practice’s.
4 Your website page load time may be slow.
5 Your website may not have a good user experience.
6 Your website is de-indexed by mistake.
SEO is divided into two parts :
On-page
off-page
On-page SEO
On-page SEO requires optimizing your website content and HTML code to increase traffic and improve search engine rankings.
Its the process of optimizing elements on the website itself-
Header Tags
Meta descriptions
Title tags
Keyword research
Keyword usage
Internal links
Site maps
Key Areas of Focus
- Technical SEO(Site settings, site maps)
- Content marketing
- Link building(combination of both internal and external link building)
- Site usability(Good site visibility, information should be useful for users)
- Tools to perform SEO
- Google analytics(Helps tracking and reporting traffic)
How to do On-page SEO
1. Keyword research: This is the process of identifying popular words and phrases used on search engines by users.
You need to understand if you choose a keyword that you want to rank for, you have to research how much traffic you are expecting to get from the keyword, and understand what the search volume is and the competition.
For you to rank on the first page of google you have to be very good at keyword research, the first tip is identifying keywords with high search volume, high relevancy, and low competition.
If you choose a keyword that has less competition, it means you can rank quicker, than a keyword that has lots of competition.
There are two types of keywords:
Short tail Keywords
Long tail keywords
Short Tail Keywords
They are more generic and consist of less than 3 words in a keyword phrase e.g. Italian restaurant
These keywords have high search volume, and high competition but less conversion rate.
For example, short tail keywords include “restaurants” “shoes” or “children’s shoes”
Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are very specific, they are used for targeted pages such as product pages and articles.
They usually consist of more than 3 words.
Compared to short tail keywords, these keywords are relatively less competitive and the search volume is also low but it has a high conversion rate.
When a visitor lands on your page by using a long tail keyword, they are usually ready to make a purchase.
For example “The best Italian restaurants in Florida or branded shoe stores in Florida”, once the visitor sees a restaurant that meets his requirement, there is a high chance he would go there to eat.
The Primary Components of keywords and research are below
1 Search Volume
2 Competition
3 Relevancy
4 Use google keyword planner
5 Find keywords with high search volume and low competition
Sitemaps
Sitemaps – are a hierarchy list of a website, a sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files, for example, when the page was last updated and any alternate language versions of the page
It is designed to help both users and search engines to understand the structure of a website
Once page navigation is
streamlined, provide users and search engines with sitemaps.
Crawler bots and visitors will turn to a sitemap to find pages quickly.
While crawler bots can index site maps in HTML as they index all other webpages, SEO pros should create and submit XML sitemaps.
Its a quicker way of letting Google find your blog posts or pages.
Benefits of adding your sitemaps to Google Search Console
1 Tell Google about your Store & Website
It would be easy for Google to show your website when people search relevant keywords that you have on your website, showing them all the relevant products and pages you have, sitemaps gives them what they want and showing your website and store to more people
2 Get insights to help you get more traffic
You would be able to get to know how many impressions you are having, how often you are showing up in search results, which post is generating more traffic so you actually get to know what’s working and what’s not working
Prerequisite to add your website sitemaps on Google
1 You need a Google Search Console Account
2 You need to Locate your Sitemap
There are two types of sitemaps
HTML sitemaps : Designed for humans
XML sitemaps: Designed for crawlers
How to create your website sitemap URL and add it to Google Search Console
1. Visit xml-sitemaps
2 Input your website URL
3 Download Your XML Sitemap file
4 login to your hosting cPanel
5 Click on file manager
6 Click on public_html
7 Upload the xml file there
8 Go to Google Search Console, click on sitemap.
9 Then simply type in sitemap.xml
10 Confirm by checking using your URL
example https://bigcyber.com.ng/sitemap.xml
Technical Audits
Ensure your site is being crawled and indexed.
Search engines around the world have written a bots performing particular processes known as crawling.
This bots scan a website and copy the entire content and store it in the search engine called index
How to check if your post has being indexed
1 Go to Google Search Console
2 Click Pages
3 View data about indexed pages
On-site Optimization
Develop a high quality content, a richly keyword optimized meta tags, URLs and submit your sitemaps.
Enhanced User Experience
Create a good website architecture and internal linking.
Sites with a simple and clear layout are easier to navigate so users and crawler bots prefer them.
Homepages = generic info; navigation from them
should lead to progressively more specific paths
Breadcrumbs are helpful, guiding users and crawler bots more quickly through multiple navigation paths.
When creating pages, ensure there is a system of internal links that allows users and crawler bots to navigate to the pages. Since orphan pages can only be found by typing the exact URL, search engines need to have a path that leads them
to webpages.
OFF-page SEO
Off-page SEO involves using promotional methods to obtain a higher search engine ranking for your website.
This are actions taking outside your website to improve your ranking.
This helps in improving website recognitions, credibility, trustworthiness and authority.
This involves link building (External backlink) from other blogs or website, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube and many more communities like stack overflow, Quora, reedit.
Benefit in implementing Off-Page SEO
1 Increases traffic coming to your website.
2 It causes a high increase in your domain authority.
3 It brings better credibility.
4 Increase in page rank
5 Increase in brand awerness.
Strategies to drive Off-Page SEO
1 High quality content
2 Increase Off-site engagement about your website.
3 Reach out to content that are similar to yours, and ask them for a backlink.
4 Get social media backlinks from(Quora, Facebook, twitter)
5 Collaborating with other Bloggers
How to do Off-Page SEO
1 Link Building: It is the practice of navigating links from other website to your own
2 Getting other website to link to you.
Building external links to your website can help organic search ranking
Tools for SEO
Mozilla(Freemium)
Google keywords planner(Paid)
Ahrefs(Paid)
SEMRUSH(Paid)
Google Search Console (Free)
ScreamingFrog(paid)
These tools allow you to
- Search for a list of relevant keywords (high volume and low competition), You don’t want to find relevant key words with high volume.
- Choose keywords with high search volume and low difficulty
- Select primary and secondary keywords wisely(have a portfolio of diverse relevant keywords)
- Identify the keywords that your competitors are ranking for
- Search engine bots to crawl and index your website more effectively
- Check the correct format of the sitemap structures
- Monitor website backlinks
- Analyze the strongest links of your webpages
- Perform competitor analysis
- Measure ratio of referring domains to backlinks
- Identify and disavow poor backlinks
- Track number of dofollow and nofollow links
- Track your websites ranking
- Meaure average click-through rates and impressions
- Track keywords ranking for desktop and mobile across locations
- You can check your domain authority on moz
- Check backlinks that have low domain authority and dofollow your self from them, because it would hurt your domain authority.
- Moz have on-page and off-page optimization
10 SEO Tips To Rank on Google's First Page
1) Optimize your URL(Uniform Resource locator).
2) Your website should have a simple and honest design(Good site visibility).
3) The content on your page must be valuable(Information should be useful to users).
4) Contain Keywords
5) Call-to-action-based contents.
6) Your website should be search engine friendly.
7) Provide responsive design for users across different devices.
8) Your website should posses link building(Combination of both internal & external Iink building)
9) Strong Social media channels.
10) Create a Google Business page.
1) Optimize your URL(Uniform Resource locator).
A URL is a web address, the string of letters and/or numbers (usually starting with http or https) that lead you to a website. The letters after the final period refer to the website’s Top-Level Domain (TLD) and is called a domain suffix (examples are .com or .org).
Every website has a URL, web address, its unique reference point in a network. The URL can be broken down into smaller parts.
Top Level Domains
.com = Commercial
.gov = Government
.edu = Education
.mil = Military
.org = Organization
.net = Networks
Top-level Domain .com is preferable because if two or more websites share the same name and implement the same SEO practice, but have different extensions, the website with the .com domain extension will rank highest in most results. This is because people tend to trust .com websites and will generally choose them over .net or .biz alternatives, and websites with more traffic perform better in search engines & Using a .com is the most authoritative way of guaranteeing your site will be found on the web.
Website owners should choose clear, simple, and informative domains so that when users visit their site they already have a clear idea of what the website is all about, users would easily remember URLs with specific words, rather than numbers or symbols.
They will also find it easier to navigate the site because the site layout is easily understood from the URL, hence search engines would move URLs with the above characteristics.
Website owners should prioritize using the well-secured HTTPS protocol over the less-secured HTTP. Because:
– Of the ever-increasing need for internet security
-Google updated its algorithm to reward HTTPS Sites
Since URLs influence ranking, specific pages and folders need to be optimized by carefully choosing their names, rich keyword names improve ranks, and these names can be associated with important brands and industry keywords.
Pages that can be easily indexed
Product and Service Categories: Use product and service categories where possible and natural.
Brand: People search for brand names they know, so use them naturally in URLs.
Skills: Skills that a company is known for are part of its brand identity. Ranking for skills is valuable, Skills can be incorporated into blog folders and
post names or other informative pages of a site.
Industry Class or Sector: People often use words associated with industry class or sector in search. Including these words naturally in site design can help boost ranking.
PRO TIPS
To make URLs easy for readers and web crawler bots, they
should have the following:
– Closely matched page titles
– No stop words – and, of, it, is, with
– Hyphens, not spaces, underscores, or lack of space
– 100 characters or less
– Folders, rather than subdomains
2) Your website should have a simple and honest design.
Website owners who want their websites to rank on Google’s first page should make sure that their site has a simple and clear layout that is easy to navigate so users and crawler bots prefer them and can crawl their websites easier to index them.
The pages should be laid out along intuitive and simple paths, and navigation from the home page to other pages should be progressive.
Site owners should make use of breadcrumbs that guide users and crawler bots more quickly through multiple navigation paths.
Page Architecture
– Page Titles (title tags): give the reader a clear idea of what the page is about
– Are displayed in various off-page places
– Typically, are about 70 characters containing a basic content descriptor and brand name On a website, the title is often displayed:
– In a tab
– At the top of a window
– Page titles sometimes mirror the URL, but don’t have to
Meta-descriptions
– Meta-descriptions: one for each webpage; short paragraphs that don’t display on webpages themselves
– Crawled for the info to help index pages Displayed on SERPs, just under the page title and URL
– Allow users to read a brief description of the brand and page contents
– Should include keywords to convey the most important and accurate info within the first 150 – 160 characters
3) The content on your page must be valuable
Website owners have to craft great content to share to earn a spot on the first page of Google, the content must be valuable, see below for qualities of valuable content.
Valuable content is
- Informative
- Compelling- convincing
- Accurate
- Specific
- Unique
- Fresh
Contents to Share to rank on Google's first page
Multimedia: engage users more quickly than paragraphs of text; images, infographics, and videos are regularly backlinked because they support other people’s content; the creator is established as a valuable info source
Lists: allow for quick reading in digestible chunks that are easily scanned; provide a point of reference for research/ideas.
Research: companies that conduct research and share valuable stats benefit from a high number of links
Guides: may be visual step-by-step representations, or short videos demoing specific techniques; very linkable and likely to generate traffic
Interviews: short interviews are easily viewed and shared.
4) Your Website Should Contain Keywords
Keywords are individual words and phrases that people enter into search engines to find what they are looking for, there is more to SEO than keywords.
Potential Customers type in words to the search engines to find a site that fits their descriptions, Search engines match these words in the search bar to the massive indexes they have of keywords across the internet, and these keywords have to appear on the sites in the right places telling the WebCrawler bots to look at the webpage.
Choosing Keywords for a site requires a lot of research, you have to come up with a long list of keywords and decide which ones are likely to produce the right results.
Types of Keywords
1. Primary Keywords
2. Secondary Keywords
3. Short tail keywords
4. Long tail Keywords
Primary Keywords
This is the one term that is used to search for a site, primary keywords must be used in specific places across sites.
Primary keywords need to be used in specific areas on webpages
1. URL
2. Header and Footer Content
3. Title tags and meta tags and description tags of pages
4. File names, alt tags, and descriptions of images and other multimedia.
5. First paragraph or first section of web copy
6. Later Section of the web copy
Note Overuse = Keyword stuffing leads to SERP Demotion or de-indexing
URLs
It’s relevant to a keyword query
Use SEO-friendly URLs, as they help to understand what the page is about.
Poor URL structure is a big issue in SEO which may result in low ranking
Header and Footer Content
Header tags are HTML tags that are used to identify headings and subheadings of your content.
The hierarchy of the header tags goes from H1 to H6.
Ensure to put primary keywords in both H1 and H2 tags and use them more on your website, because Google bots can easily identify the keyword easily, hence helping you rank on Google first.
That also is applicable to your footer content ensure to put primary keywords in the tags.
Title tags and meta tags and description tags of pages
Title Tags
It is the most important factor of on-page optimization, it gives the reader a clear idea of what the page is all about.
Typically, are about 70 characters containing a basic content descriptor and a brand name, search engines like Google display the first 50-60 characters of the title tags the rest are usually truncated.
On a website title is often displayed:
– In a tab
- At the top of a window
This tag summarizes the website content, it influences the click-through rate
The primary keyword should be on the header title element displayed on the Search engine results pages(SERPs)
Meta description is a brief description (of up to 155 characters -160) that summarizes the content of the webpages
Meta-descriptions: one for each webpage; short paragraphs that don’t display on webpages themselves.
Crawled for the info to help index pages
Displayed on SERPs, just under the page title and URL
Allow users to read a brief description of the brand and page contents
Should include keywords to convey the most important and accurate info within the first 150 – 160 characters
A well written meta description are influenced through quick through rates
Note: In choosing keywords don’t choose keywords that are very broad, instead of “What is Digital marketing?” You can choose “What are the types of digital marketing”?
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