5 Proven Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking | CodewithHarsh

5 Proven Ways to Increase Your Google Ranking

SEO can be overwhelming – but paying attention to these five fundamentals can help you rank success.

Many things have changed in SEO since Google first came online in 1998.

One thing that hasn't changed is this: Your organic traffic is directly related to your search engine ranking position.

If you have a copious number of keywords in the Google index and they appear at or near the top of the search results, unlimited traffic will follow.

Conversely, if you have a good website but no visibility in the SERPs, you are bound to have any organic search traffic.

In this post, I am going to break down the steps required to boost your Google SERPs. That said, I know you are equally interested in knowing the following.

Google Ranking

How long does it take to improve Google Ranking with CodewithHarsh?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and give you the definitive answer, "It depends."

While I agree that this is disappointing and sounds like a copout, it is true. SEO does not happen in a vacuum and every situation provides a unique set of variables.

Skill, budget, level of competition, and how your website stacks up can all play a role in how quickly you can move the dial.

So, with that in mind, let's break it down into a more quantitative sense and review what you can do to make things happen sooner, not later.

During an episode of Ask Googlebot in June 2021, Google Search representative, John Mueller, said that it could take "several hours to several weeks" for Google to index new or updated content. He also cautioned that just because a page gets indexed, it doesn't mean it will rank for anything immediately, if ever.

Improve Google Ranking

Due to the number of factors at play, rapid changes in SERPs should not be expected.

Mueller has said in the past that even if you make drastic changes to the design and functionality of your website, it can take a few months or even a year for it to take effect.

However, that doesn't mean you should just sit and wait after upgrading your site. He mentioned some specific ideas to speed up indexing, including:

Preventing server overload by making your server and website faster and mainly linking to new pages.

Avoid the use of unnecessary URLs such as category page filters.
Leveraging user submission methods such as uploading sitemap files and using URL inspection tools.

In the end, Mueller reiterated that the best way to get ranked is to create high-quality content that searchers will find useful. In his words, make your site "great."

How to Improve Your Google Ranking with CodewithHarsh?

It takes a lot of hard work, skill and sometimes luck to reach the top 10 SERPs in less than a year.

And this takes us back to the topic of today's discussion on how to improve your Google ranking.

If you want to get your website to rank on the first page of Google, you'll need to perform the following five steps.

1. Start with a Sound Foundation

Poor website structure and information architecture can ruin even the best SEO campaigns.

If your website is difficult for users to navigate and Google crawls, your ranking is likely to suffer. Pay attention to core web vitals.

Do a Technical SEO Audit

The Google algorithm includes thousands of signals, plus machine learning and AI, to determine search rankings.

That said, attending to the fundamentals will, even today, give you an advantage over many competitors. Here are the steps required to conduct an SEO audit.

2. Provide a Great Page Experience

Google defines page experience as "a set of cues" that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its net information value on both mobile and desktop devices. ,

Core Web Vitals

Whether it is a mobile or desktop site, you must continuously monitor the speed and keep improving it. Specifically, greatest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS).

File Size

For file size, use your favorite image editing program.

Before uploading, you can further optimize the size of the file with apps like Optimizeilla, Image Recycle, and Kraken.io.

Finally, always confirm that the dimensions of the image fit into the reserved image space to maintain the clean, structured look of your live webpage.

Browser Caching

When a web browser loads a page, it loads multiple resources. Browser caching stores these resource files locally on users' computers.

Thus, when a user navigates to a new page, there is no need to reload those resources.

For most, the best way to enable caching is to add code to the web host/server, htaccess file.

For WordPress, there are free plugins available to accomplish this, such as WP Super Cache.

Script Handling

Before you load countless JS and CSS files to enhance your site, make sure you need those extra enhancements as they tend to slow down your website.

For example, to make things run faster, you can also minify your files by separating comments.

And if it is possible to merge multiple scripts in a single file, then go for it. This way, there will be only one recovery call to the server to load all the scripts.

Here are some tools that can help you measure and monitor core web vitals.

Mobile Friendly

With the growth of search and mobile-first indexing, your website needs to pass the mobile-friendly test.

According to Google "... our crawling, indexing and ranking systems typically use the desktop version of a page's content... Mobile-first indexing means that we use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking. Will use..."

To avoid mobile ranking problems, you should double the search intent and performance.

HTTPS

Check if the connection to your site is secure. If the page doesn't display over HTTPS, learn how to make it secure.

No Interfering Intermediates

Intrusive interstitial pages are page elements that obscure content from users' point of view, usually for promotional purposes.
    

3. Optimize Your Pages for Google

It goes without saying that you should write great content that engages readers so that they can read till the last paragraph.

To win them over your target audience quickly, start with a quick summary introduction that tells readers what they expect to find in that post.

Now, to make your content Google friendly, some of the best strategies you can implement are:

Tell Google what your pages are about

Do this by adding structured data throughout your site. That way, Google can easily understand what your content is about.

Schema.org is the format preferred by Google. Schema types include cuisine, business, product, author, and more.

Keep your titles short

In addition to turning off your readers because it will be impossible for them to get all the information at a glance, extra long titles will also hurt the SEO impact of your keywords.

To properly fit the SERP length, keep your titles between 135 and 159 characters. SEO plugins can help you identify titles with excessive characters.

Craft unique title and meta description

Even though the title and meta description do not have a direct impact on the ranking of your website, they are quite important in portraying the value of your content from the SERP.

Thus, if done correctly, they can increase your click-through rate and subsequently increase your traffic.

So, make sure you write unique title with a simple and catchy description that also contains a target keyword.

Additionally, you should also be aware that if you do not write your own unique and vivid meta description with targeted keywords for your pages, Google will generate them automatically.

Obviously, auto-generated ones will not be as effective for your site as those that you have prepared properly. Still, you should be careful not to fill in your title and description with keywords.

Be specific in your inner anchor text

Get straight to the point if you want your content to rank for a specific keyword.

Many websites inadvertently use obscure and elusive anchor text to link to other pages on their site.

This is a huge mistake as it will not be a clear enough anchor for your visitors and even search engines.

4. Optimize for Search Intent

The development of modern search has its roots in the hummingbird, later supplemented by RankBrain and then BERT.

The end game for Google is to better understand the context of a search in order to serve up results that match the intent of a given query. In fact, Google's continued success depends on it.

There are four common types of search (aka user) intent:-

• Navigational - Search for a particular website.
• Informative - the pursuit of knowledge.
• Commercial - Exploration of data (such as reviews) to make an informed purchase decision.
• Transactional - a search to make a purchase (where to buy).

How to optimize for search intent

Check the SERPs for the keyword phrase you are interested in ranking for. If the top results don't align with your page, you're not going to rank. In other words, if Google has decided that the purpose of the search is informational and your page is transactional, that page will not rank well.

In cases where a page doesn't match the top results/search intent, you have two options:-

• Edit your page to match the intent.
• Create a new page to match the intent.

5. Optimize Internal Links

Links on your website should be strategically placed, and you should ensure that all links are working properly. Here are a few tricks to up your links game.

Optimize Internal Links

Link architecture

The page depth of your site should not exceed three clicks; An efficiency hack that sometimes people forget.

A proper internal linking strategy will mean that your best pages will be displayed at the first level.

An effective way to do this is to create a home page section that links directly to your 'best selling products' or 'top categories'.

Fix broken links and duplicates

Some website owners have a habit of ignoring broken links because they don't realize the impact of a bad user experience.

By running a crawl on your site with a tool like Site bulb, you can easily detect and fix 404 errors in a jiffy!

Retrieve your site mentions

Retrieve your site mentions by setting up Google Alerts that will help you keep track of your brand mentions on the internet.

And if a mention comes up without linking back to your site, contact the webmaster and request them to link back!

Take Away

SEO can seem overwhelming. It's easy to get caught up in the paralysis of analysis and do nothing.

That said, it's important to remember that even in 2022, simply paying attention to the basics, as mentioned above, will position you for online success.

More resources:-

• 10 Different Ways to Get Organic Page 1 Google Rankings
• 12 actions to help improve your Google keyword ranking
• Google Ranking Factors: Fact or Fiction