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A terrible mistake you can make as a business owner is not to follow trends in your industry and global trends generally. The world is ever-evolving, and one must keep up or be left behind. That’s why understanding SEO ranking is important to your business.

A major paradigm shift in the business world is that, more than ever, many businesses have gone virtual with their various websites. Over 71% of small businesses are online. This shows that brands will always have to compete for internet traffic.

Having an online presence without impacting your business is not a worthwhile venture. This is why brands must put conscientious effort into driving traffic to their websites. Therefore, choosing from website templates that are already fully designed, where they can add their content is common practice today. Most businesses in fact decide to choose from this existing library of templates and create website templates that can meet users’ needs and have got to do more than have just a fancy design. Choosing from the library of templates will not only bring traffic but will also turn guests into customers.

Although it isn’t bad to have a good website design, there are various techniques to employ if you want your site to stand tall among its equals, and one of them is undoubtedly SEO. Perhaps you are already wondering what SEO entails. Do not panic. This piece is a comprehensive guide to understanding SEO rankings and how to get your site ranked higher.

What Is SEO Ranking?

Woman explaining the importance of understanding SEO ranking.

SEO refers to collective techniques employed to help one’s website rank higher on search results pages and consequently drive organic traffic to the site. There are numerous types of SEO, including on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO. 

On-page SEO comprises anything on your web pages targeted at driving traffic to your site. On the other hand, off-page SEO refers to things like backlinks outside your website, which help improve your website’s SEO rating. Technical SEO involves analytical skills, and local SEO is a type of SEO geared towards increasing your website’s visibility in local search results on Google so for example if you are based in London, it might make sense to hire an SEO consultant in London to help your strategy. Of course please hire Matchbox Design Group if located in St. Louis, MO, or the United States in general.

SEO ranking is simply the position of a webpage on a search results page. A high SEO ranking translates to your website appearing at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This means that your site will attract lots of traffic. There are various factors on which SEO ranking depends. 

This includes URL structure, page load time, number of backlinks, sitemap, and internal linking, among other factors. 

If you have been looking for ways to drive traffic to your site, search no more. Below are tips to help get your site ranked higher on search engines like Google. SEO proposal is a great way to improve your ranking on search engines like Google. It will help you bring more visitors to the website, increasing both visibility as well as conversion rates for marketing campaigns.

5 Ways To Improve Your Site’s Ranking

Having your site ranked higher on Google is not rocket science if you are ready to do the right thing and be patient for results. Below are tips that will give great results.

1. Publish High-Quality, Relevant Content

Content marketing. Publish High-Quality, Relevant Content.

The first and most important thing to do on the journey to getting your site ranked higher on Google is to publish quality and relevant content. Nothing can and should replace quality content if you intend to see your site at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Here, you should focus on creating relevant content for the users. The key is to discuss what interests the users, not what you want to discuss. There are laid down procedures to follow in creating optimized content. One such thing is keywords.

While you shouldn’t deviate from the main goal of creating audience-focused content, it is necessary to also input some keywords in your content. This enables search engines to display your content whenever a user searches for related terms. 

When choosing keywords and topics, you should focus on long-tail keywords, use a keyword research tool, and ensure that your topic matches the keywords. Other ways to ensure your content is optimized are using simple project management software to properly develop the outline and format for optimal readability, sticking to your topic and target keywords, and including backlinks throughout the content. And once your content is created, you can still optimize it by working on the title tag, meta description, and URL.

2. Frequently Update Published Content

You may think that once you have published your content, that’s the end. Far from it! After some time, Google rates your content as “unfresh,” a factor used in determining the quality of your website. Instead of publishing new content of the same kind, you must update and optimize the old ones periodically to keep them fresh. You can update your content by creating an infographic from an old blog article That way, you will save time and energy while still achieving the same results, but at a quicker rate. 

There are numerous benefits attached to updating your content. One of those is improving your click-through rate. Updating your content will also offer you the opportunity to fix any grammatical or spelling errors (you can run your content through Grammarly’s free grammar checker). Yes, grammar and spelling do not directly influence ranking but impact user experience, which is a key factor in SEO ranking. Use timeline templates to track, refresh and update your content. This will also allow you to remove broken links and improve the keywords, among other things.

3. Metadata

Metadata is simply data about data. Most people don’t know that search engines do not “read” your content but its metadata. Metadata is what defines or provides information about the contents of your website. Search engines such as Google index specified metadata fields by finding out what they are. If you want your content to appear higher in search results, include metadata such as keywords, search engine title, description, and date. It is also necessary to update the metadata from time to time.

The major types of metadata are title, keyword, and description metadata. The title metadata is undoubtedly the most important as far as a webpage is concerned. The title metadata is the headline shown within search engine results. You can see how important it is. The keyword metadata is a type of metadata that comprises your keyword phrases. The description metadata is simply a captivating summary of a webpage that appears in a search result. 

4. Create Backlinks To Your Website

Create Backlinks To Your Website. Game pieces representing businesses being connected.

Another way you can get your site ranked higher in search results is by building backlinks. A backlink or inbound link is a link created when a website links to another. The importance of backlinks, a component of off-page SEO, cannot be overemphasized. This is because backlinks represent “trust” from one site to another. Backlinks to your site are an indication that other websites find your content worthwhile. If many sites link to a particular website or webpage, search engines tend to display such a webpage or website on SERP. Building backlinks is not something you should ignore if you are serious about getting your site ranked higher.

5. Use Alt Text

Suppose you want to optimize your website and rank higher on search engine results pages. In that case, it is recommended that you always use alt texts, also known as “alt attributes” or “alt tags,” to describe images and video media.

This is necessary mostly for those who use text-only browsers or screen readers. Adding the appropriate alt tags will help search engines locate your page in such cases. When writing alt texts, try as much as possible to keep them brief. An alt tag should also describe the image or video as specifically as possible. 

Conclusion

Aside from having your content on top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is equivalent to increased traffic to your site, knowing that people read your content brings satisfaction or fulfillment. You should invest your time, energy, and resources in SEO to have your site ranked higher in search results. By now, you should not be more clueless about what SEO entails, SEO ranking, and how you can get your site ranked higher.

Contact Matchbox Design Group Today!

If your website could use a refresh or you’re looking to drive more traffic to your site, fill out the form below and we’ll contact you to learn more about your digital needs.

Categories:  St. Louis SEO

About the Author

James McMinn

Senior Digital Strategist

James is a savvy digital marketing specialist with a Masters of Science in Internet Marketing. For the past fourteen years, he has been specializing in SEO, PPC & Marketing Strategy. He has a super sharp analytical mind and a finely tuned creative eye for marketing initiatives that optimize brands.

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