The success of any website depends solely on how high a search engine ranks your content. The higher the Google ranking, it’s more likely guests will find your site. The more guests visit your site (and stay there), the more of a boost your Google ranking will receive.
It may seem difficult to break into this cycle while your website is young and generally unknown, but it’s not impossible. One of the best ways to improve your ranking is utilizing search engine optimization, also known as SEO.
Learn more about SEO for your brand and rank higher with search engines.
Start With Your Content
The most important thing about your website is your content. If your content is lacking, you’re going to rank poorly regardless of any other strategies. Your posts should be well written, have accurate, authoritative information, and be maintained regularly.
The most common use of the Google search engine is to find answers, so if your website answers a question, it needs to be clear and direct. Not only will this improve the likelihood of guests coming back, but search engines will prioritize your answer over websites that are more difficult to understand. This authority will boost your Google ranking.
Keep track of keywords in your SEO, too. If users are trying to answer a question, know what words they’re using to enter that search and try to match it in a way that still sounds natural. This means you should include keywords where you can, but not in a way that sacrifices quality.
Here at BRANDefenders, we have perfected the art of crafting optimized content for your presence online. Our team of BRANDefenders can help you perfect your content quality and boost your pages from their previously poor rankings.
Consider Your Site Architecture
If a search engine can’t process your pages efficiently, it won’t rank you high, if at all. Search engines use special software to determine what websites are regularly maintained, trustworthy, and of good quality.
Keeping your website’s architecture in good shape includes incorporating good HTML practices. Proper structure and organization drastically improve readability, essential for users and Google’s website crawlers.
Structures such as headings and ALT text for images improve accessibility. For example, image ALT text is necessary for users who use screen-reading tools, and proper formatting of paragraphs makes it easier for anyone to read.
Mobile users are becoming increasingly common, too. If your website is unreadable on the phone, the average person isn’t going to go out of their way to find a computer to pull up the page; they’ll go to a different website.
Meta titles and descriptions make your search engine result link more clickable by providing necessary information about your page and providing a cleaner, more professional look.
However, you must be careful that this meta content is accurate so that the search engine doesn’t replace it, or worse, get you accused of misrepresentation. If you’re unsure how to do this, talk to the BRANDefenders team for insights and tips.
Link Value and Anchors
Links are the primary method of user transportation between pages and are very widely used by search engine crawlers to determine rankings.
Link anchors, usually in clickable text, should tell users and search engines what the link leads to. This is also important for accessibility, as screen reader software uses the anchor text. This means that when adding links to your website, you shouldn’t use general terms like “Click Here!” or not include anchor text at all.
The authority factor of the links you include is impactful for SEO. Citing a trustworthy source of information will improve the reputation and trustworthiness of your website. The association means that quality links will boost the assumed quality of your content.
The reverse is also true: Incorporating irrelevant or harmful links will reflect poorly on your content, and linking to anything illegal will get you banned by association.
The bottom line: vet your links correctly.
Reputation is Key
Visiting unsafe websites carries the risk of cybercrimes such as malware infections, stolen information, and the loss of your savings. Users and search engines are understandably wary of suspicious-looking and poor-quality links.
The first and easiest step to prevent this is to check your content for spelling or grammar mistakes. These are immediate red flags, and if you’re running a business, customers who see these errors may not trust your website enough to place an order. You want to come across as trustworthy, and following SEO guidelines for quality content will help with that.
Content authority is also critical in SEO. Being an expert in what you are producing goes a long way in improving your Google ranking. Blatantly wrong information will have the opposite effect and degrade the trust in everything else on your website. Double-check your sources before publishing anything.
Stay Away From Unethical Practices
Search engine software has been continuously developed since the beginning of the Internet and has gotten more sophisticated over the years. This means you can’t spam keywords at the bottom of the page to keep yourself at the top since crawlers will now recognize that and may ban you for it.
Another unethical practice is cloaking or manipulating organic search results to show links that don’t match your actual content. If Google search console catches you doing this, you can expect a ban, if not more.
You also shouldn’t host anything illegal, such as pirated or plagiarized content. Piracy will not only get your website taken down but can have other consequences, including fines and jail time.
While these “techniques” may boost your ratings temporarily, being banned will take you out of the results entirely, meaning you have to start over from scratch.
Trust BRANDefenders to Help Your SEO
BRANDefenders have years of experience giving pages the boosts they need in the search result rankings. Their customers know that BRANDefenders can handle the complex parts of SEO for them to keep their website’s Google ranking high, remove negative results, and protect them from future infractions.
