Website owners know that getting new visitors to their websites can be a struggle. Organic search, or search engine optimization, takes some of the struggles out of attracting website traffic by boosting your website’s visibility in the search engine results. By tackling specific tasks related to your website and internet marketing, you can boost your website’s position in the search engine results page (SERP), making it more visible and more likely to be clicked on by someone looking for information.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! have just one purpose in life: to match someone’s inquiry with the best website to provide the information for their inquiry. They do this by sending out automated programs, called bots or spiders that scour the internet, looking for fresh, new content, whether it’s a web page, a blog post or a PDF document uploaded to a server. The bots or spiders can only read text, so as they peruse your website, they’re looking at both the text on the page and the codes running behind the page. They look for specific words or phrases used frequently and other cues that tells them what the page is about. Then they send that information back to the servers running the search engines for future reference. That information, plus many other online signals, gets fed into the search engine’s computer programs to determine where you web page appears on a search engine results page.
Each search engine uses its own proprietary method of determining how well your web page matches a user’s query when they type a term or phrase into a search engine box. The search engines don’t tell anyone exactly how they calculate the SERPs. Internet marketers and search engine experts have tested, tweaked and studied the major search engines, especially Google, to figure out their best guess as to what makes a page rise in the ranks to the top results on the first page and what sinks them into oblivion.
Five Tips to Get Your Site to Rise in the Ranks
Most search engine optimization experts agree that site owners can take many steps to help boost their website’s rank on the SERPS and consequently, attract more website visitors. There are numerous studies proving that the higher up in the organic or natural (not paid) search a website appears, the more people are likely to click on it. It makes sense; people aren’t likely to dig through several pages of results when they find what they need on the first page.
The following five tips are easy steps you can take now to help your website rise in the ranks. Try them and see how much of a difference it makes!
- Decide what keywords you will target, and make sure they are highly relevant and specific to your website’s information. Use them in the headlines at least once on a page and in the body copy at least a few times. Make sure the back-end codes are tagged with them, too.
- Create fresh content regularly and upload it to your website. Blogs are great for frequent updates, social media shares, and keyword-rich content that search engines love.
- Submit your website to the online directories and search engines! Yes, search engines will find your page eventually, but you can get there more quickly by actually entering your site into their system so that it’s on their radar.
- Build a linking campaign. Inbound links (links pointing INTO your website from other sites) are an extremely effective way of raising a site’s position in the search engine results. Do not swap a link for a link, an action dubbed ‘reciprocal linking’. That worked well years ago, but today it doesn’t work or can actually penalize your website. Instead, try offering some free content such as a worksheet, template, information sheet, how-to video, and other content that website owners will want to link to because it adds value for their customers.
- Repeat these steps and continue to monitor, tweak and update your website’s SEO each month. Many website owners think that search engine optimization is a ‘once and done’ method of marketing. Instead, it’s more like maintenance on a car; it should be done periodically to keep traffic running smoothly!
Web Design of Palm Beach can help with this and other website projects. We offer affordable, reliable website hosting, website design, search engine optimization consulting and much, much more. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or speak with a web design expert today.