Basics On How to Rank Your Site

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By now, almost everyone knows that you absolutely have to work on your website and make improvements so that it ranks on Google. Per many studies on user search habits, Google’s first page gets anywhere between 95-99% of the web traffic, with each subsequent page receiving less and less of the traffic share.

Many business owners and managers know that they have to get there, but how? To many people, it can seem like a bit of a complex situation where no one really understands how to get there – and if they are there, they can’t explain what they did to get there.

The truth is that you have to be persistent, creative, dedicated, and smart in the ways that you build your website and follow along with Google’s algorithm. There aren’t any magic wands you can use to get there; you have to put in the old-fashioned work.

Here are some basics on how to rank your website:

Know the Google Algorithm – Or At Least Research It

The one thing you have to do is understand that Google does have an algorithm and they use it. There are multiple SEO strategies that people use to fulfill all of the prerequisites of it. This algorithm is constantly changing and adjusting, and you will never get prior notice about it changing – and you probably won’t even get it when it does happen. Changes happen almost every day, sometimes multiple times per day.

The good news is that Google will announce any major changes and if a website is built correctly and with value, it will be able to withstand much of the fluctuation.

Know Your Current Search Ranking

If you want to improve your ranking or rank at all, you need to know where you stand. There are some tools that can help you to do that, whether you want to check for a specific keyword or a phrase. You will have to assess your rank, and with certain tools, you can even look into desktop searches, mobile searches, and local searches.

Know Your Website’s Speed

How long does it take your website to load when someone clicks on it? While this might seem minor, it is actually one of the biggest factors that Google looks at when ranking websites. If your website is slow, you will have a harder time getting a high search position.

Not only that, but customers will notice this as well. According to Tulsa Seo Specialists JSA interactive You will experience a sharp decrease in time on the page if the pages take more than a second or two to load. If this happens to you, it won’t matter what you offer or how much work you have done; the search algorithm will push you down toward the bottom of the page – even if you previously ranked very high.

Give Your Website a Check-Up

Do websites get sick? Well, there’s a chance. You want to optimize your website, especially if you were doing extremely well and all of a sudden, you find that your website isn’t doing what you wanted it to do. It might be that Google has deindexed or banned your website from its rankings, which is often the case if you use “black hat” or somewhat devious SEO techniques.

There are quite a few different tools out that you can use to determine the health of your website and whether it continues to rank – or you can do some manual searches by yourself.

Of course, you also have to listen to the domain age – there are some differences in domain age. It might not seem like six months or a year makes that much of a difference as time passes, but Google does tend to value the age of a domain.

Understand the Metrics You Need

The next thing you need to do is track the vital metrics of your website to find out if there are any areas you need to improve upon in the coming weeks – and there will be factors that you need to improve. Some of the things that you want to look at include:

Organic Traffic: It is important that you know how many people actually find your website via Google. This will be your base measurement for all of your efforts and metrics that you will keep in the future. Knowing the number of people who come to your website organically can help you to determine everything from keywords to target audiences.

Conversions From That Traffic: As you look through the organic traffic that comes to your website, you ought to pay attention to the keywords that generate the traffic from your website – not just the keywords that bring them there. You will be able to find many different keywords using analytic tools that track your website for up to a year. It is important to track commercial keywords as well – those are the ones that will actually make you money. Most often, these are informational keywords about “how to do” something, “how to get free,” something or “…for free” keywords. These aren’t the only options, but they tend to be great starting places.

Some of the words to look for include: order, shipping, purchase, review, buy, deal, coupon, and free.

Set Up a Dashboard

One of the most important things you can do is find a way to track your information. You can do this by setting up an SEO dashboard so that you can keep track of your important metrics. This can be done in the most simplistic of ways, or you can take your time to personalize and set up your own dashboard.

No matter what you do, you have to keep yourself in line and track what you are doing – nothing will work if you are just throwing techniques at the wind. You will never truly be able to rank that way, and you will end up doing more damage to your website than you will do good for it.

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