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Seven top ways to improve your Google ranking

Clearly, any organisation wanting to increase visitor numbers to its website needs to enhance its ranking with major search engines such as Google before it does anything else.

And as you may already realise, while paid search results can boost traffic to a site, research shows users are more likely to click on unpaid or organic results.

A number of factors will determine which pages a search engine shows, including content, metadata and relevance to the searcher’s query.

But there are several things you can do to boost your chances of improving your ranking, none of which is that hard to achieve.

Here, we give a brief overview of some of them.

  1. Post regular new content

Whether that’s with blogs or news stories, social media or new pages, you should be updating your digital content all the time. Indeed, it’s one of the key indicators to a search engine of how relevant a site is.

  1. Be mobile

We know we’ve said it before, but we can’t stress it enough. Your website needs to be mobile-friendly to have its best chance of success, and there are many simple ways of doing this.

  1. Give Flash a swerve

Many smaller businesses in particular like to use Flash to run their sites, and it has the added advantage of being relatively inexpensive. Yet the likes of Google will rank Flash-based sites more harshly than those operating via other platforms. Change to something like WordPress to improve your chances of landing a more prominent position.

  1. URL structure

This is one of the key things a search engine uses to decide page rank – and you need to make them easy for internet spiders to trawl. Here are some of the things you can do:

  • Keep URLs short and sweet, which also makes for a better user experience
  • Use URLs to help categorise site pages
  • Make sure they’re relevant to the page’s keywords and topics
  1. Have a sitemap

This is a page which creates and lists links to every other major page of your website, and it means spiders can find pages promptly and in a way that’s more relevant to the searcher, who can get to the information they need with fewer clicks.

  1. Page titles

Search engines use the title tag to show a page in its search results – it also displays at the top of the browser. The tags indicate what the page is all about, but Google will only show a maximum of 60 characters in title tags. So you need to ensure these descriptions are short, relevant and attention-grabbing. Keep page topics and any keywords near the front of the description.

  1. And, finally … keep tabs on your progress

You won’t know how effective your SEO is unless you keep track of progress. Keep assessing your page ranking and referrer log to see the route searchers take to your site, and what search terms they use to get there.

How we can help

Front Page Advantage has worked with scores of clients across the UK and beyond since 2006, from many varied market sectors. We’ve helped them to boost their organic search ratings – we could help you, too.

We have a detailed understanding of those SEO techniques which work, as well as those which don’t. Get in touch today to learn more.