Anyone with a website wants to see it rocket to the top of Google search results, where it will inevitably be clicked on by anyone who searches for a related term – problem is, getting your site there is a lot easier said than done. A lot of new websites and business owners set up their sites, start adding content and check the Google results… where is it? For Google to start ranking your site, you’ve got to get the basics of good SEO (search engine optimization) right. To help you make sure you’re doing everything you can to get your site ranking on Google, here are 5 ways to improve your Google rankings:
1. Make Sure Your Site is Actually Registered with Google
Many people don’t realize that your site actually has to be registered with Google before it starts to rank with them. If you want Google (and other search engines) to discover your website, it needs to be listed in their index. If it’s not in their index, they don’t know about it.
While Google can index your site without you registering it – provided enough other sites link to it so Google stumbles across it – it’s better if you register it yourself. Ionos has a great step-by-step guide on how to index your site yourself, or you can get professionals to do it for you.
2. Ensure Your Site is Set Up to Be Google Friendly
Certain website-building platforms and hosts are set up better for Google indexing than others. Platforms like WordPress are great because they are built to talk easily to Google, but regardless of what platform you use, make sure you utilize your title and meta description tags correctly.
These tags are the way you can identify and summarize what your pages are to Google, so they know who to recommend them to. Another issue you need to pay attention to is how user-friendly your site is. Google has one aim: to provide its users with the very best results they can, so they are more likely to suggest well-designed sites with great content.
3. Give it Time
Google’s indexing takes time. Typically, it takes between 4 days and 4 weeks for a new site to be indexed by Google and crawled by bots. If a month has passed since you registered your website and you still haven’t seen any sign of your site being indexed, you may have an error you need to address. Google can tell you if you have any errors if you use Google Search Console.
4. Make Sure There’s Enough Content on Your Site
If you want your site to start ranking on Google, you need to make sure there is enough content on your site that visitors actually want to find. You need to remember that Google isn’t trying to help you get traffic, but help its users find the content they want. Therefore, if you focus on giving your users and customers information they want to see, Google will start to show them the resources or pages on your website.
5. Start Getting High-Value Links
One of the best things you can do for your Google ranking is to start building up as many quality inbound links (other sites and sources linking to your site) as possible, as well as linking from your site to other good quality sites, and also link within your own site, to show Google that there is a wealth of information for users to find there.
Building up quality links takes time, and there aren’t any hacks you can do to speed up this process beyond building relationships with other authoritative sites and asking them to link to posts where you’ve mentioned or linked to one of their articles. A professional SEO company can often help you speed up this process, and the process of getting your website ranked on Google, so if you simply don’t have the time to dedicate to getting your website to rank, we can help.
First grab your copy of our new report 7 Breakthrough Strategies to Grow Your Sales on Google
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