Search Engine Optimization

According to Hubspot, 75% of searchers never scroll the past the first page of search results. This essentially means that having a low-ranking page is not really an option. So, how can you ensure that your page ends up on that holy grail of a first page?

There are seemingly endless strategies of improving a page’s rank and people dedicate their entire career to wrestling with search engine algorithms. Improving page rank is not a quick and easy checklist, but a continuous battle to outcompete competitor’s pages and keep up with the everchanging algorithms. However, it’s worth your while. 61% of internet users research a product online before they make a purchase. Any company cannot afford to not be present in 61% of potential customers heads when they are taking their initial dive into the marketing funnel.

When designing a strategy to raise your rank it is important to understand how search engines actually work. Essentially, google sends out digital bots called spiders or crawlers that crawl around the web and find pages which are in turn added to their index. If for some reason spiders are not able to find a page, that page will not be indexed and will be invisible to searchers. That can be good or bad depending on the page, but it’s important that you are the one deciding if your pages are shown. The best way to stop a bot from finding your page is to add a robots.txt file to your page. If a page you want to be displayed is not being displayed it could be because spiders can’t navigate to your page. Spiders cannot use the search function on your site, cannot sign in to anything or create an account, cannot read or understand things in an image or video, or can get lost if your site layout is too complex/distracting. The best way to make sure a spider can make it to every page you want them to is to make sure that you link to every page on your site. Also ensure that a spider doesn’t have any logins, pictures, or search functions in its way.

Once a page is crawled it gets indexed by the spiders which basically means that the page could be displayed during a relevant search. A page can be removed from the index if the URL has a “not found” error, the page has a noindex meta tag, the URL is being punished for breaking the search engine’s guidelines, or the page is uncrawlable. Regardless of the why steps need to be taken to get a site indexed if it wants to be shown on a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

Once a page is indexed it is just waiting for a searcher to search a relevant term. However, depending on several different factors, pages are ordered from most to least relevant SERP. This process is known as ranking and is one of the most important factors for marketers.

Some of the best ways to increase a page’s rank are as follow:

1)   Create backlinks – These are links to a website from another independent site. Google uses them to decide how credible a page is and as a result, the more backlinks a page has the more that page is trusted and the higher it will be ranked.

2)   Publish quality content - This will do things like increase traffic and how often users interact with your site. Both of these factors are used in Google’s algorithm for determining which pages are ranked the highest.

3)   Improve page speed – Page speed is another factor that Google and users look at when deciding if they like a site.

4)   Optimize images – Spiders cannot look at images so it is important to make sure that all images have descriptive file names and have alternate text that lets spiders know what is in that image.

5)   Improve site performance – Google looks at how users interact with a site and if they just bounce constantly or tend not to click on the site it will likely be demoted. The inverse is true also.

There are so many aspects that go into designing a strong SEO strategy, but simply completing these first easy five is a good start for any business. For a more complete explanation read this guide by MOZ.