Getting one of the coveted top-five result spots on a Google search is an aspiration of most businesses who invest in their digital presence. You may have heard the term search engine optimization (SEO) tossed around; SEO is all the practices created to influence a website’s positioning in an organic search. In simple words, it’s what you’ve got to do to be one of those top-five search result spots.
How do you capitalize on SEO to improve your rankings in a search engine such as Google? As overwhelming as the concept appears to be, it is a fairly straightforward task. Here are three ways to move your site up the ladder of search results, without having an anxiety attack.
1. Publish Quality Content
In the world of SEO, quality content is king. All the tweaking of metadata will only get you so far; your content has to bring it home. The best part is you can engage the assistance of SEO blog writing services to make sure you are getting grade-A content with the right keywords inside. The right service can offer you a couple of different products– like guest blogs to create backlinks, and on-site content, all in long-form, and short-form pieces. A good blog post, for example, won’t be more than about 600 words, so it is easy for the search engine to crawl. It will have relevant, but non-competing links attached to descriptive keywords and will be broken into easy-to-read chunks through the use of heading tags and text formatting.
2. Remember the Metadata
The data behind the data. This is, essentially what metadata is. Metadata can be broken down into three, main types: descriptive, administrative, and structural. Descriptive metadata is the most commonly used and easiest to alter of the types for web creation purposes. These tags will be placed in the “head” section of your website’s HTML and will only be seen by web crawlers and search engines, not your average user. Here are two elements to address:
Title Tag
If the content is king, then the title tag is the crown prince; it is next in line for the all-important rise in SEO stats. In a nutshell, a title tag tells the search engine what the web page is all about. Your title tag becomes visible when:
- displayed in search engine results
- in the open tabs of a web browser
- linked on social media
Meta Description
Supported by most major search engines, your site’s meta description is what they pull from when a concise summary of the content within is needed. This meta attribute is often displayed as one or two sentences under the title tag listed in search results. If this is not filled in, the search engine will attempt to come up with its own description of your content. It is better to provide one to them instead. This will often affect click-through rates, and it is best not to leave it up to Google.
3. Update Everything Regularly
If you aren’t growing you’re dying, as they say, and this is true also of your web presence. You’ve got your website set, and you’ve reached a glorious second position in your keywords search results, so now you can relax, right? Google will take into account how old the content and data it looks at are. Slowly, or possibly even quickly, your number two slot will drop to number seven or worse; it could knock you to the second page of results! Set a schedule to come back and review everything and tweak as necessary. Regularly posting to a blog will help with this issue as well. It can just be small updates linked back to bigger projects; it is as easy as that.
Being attractive to Google and other search engines doesn’t have to be hard, but you do have to be proactive and diligent to remain at the top.
