If you’re anything like me, you want your website to rank high in search engine results. After all, who doesn’t want their site to be the first one that comes up when someone searches for a particular keyword? But how to increase SEO ranking?
There are several things you can do to improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). In this blog post, I’ll share 9 tips on how to increase SEO ranking. Hopefully, these tips will help you get the coveted top spot on Google!
How to Increase SEO Ranking
There are many strategies you can employ to improve your position in the search engine results pages.
These include optimizing your website content for the relevant keywords, building high-quality inbound links, and ensuring your website is mobile-friendly.
By taking these steps, you can improve your chances of ranking higher in the search results and driving more traffic to your website.
1. Publish Relevant, Authoritative Content
When it comes to SEO marketing, quality, authoritative content is key. There’s no substitute for great content when it comes to boosting your search engine rankings. So make sure you’re publishing relevant, engaging content regularly!
Creating quality content can be a huge investment, but it is worth it if you want to increase site traffic and improve your site’s authority and relevance.
Use web writing best practices to present yourself as an authoritative figure on whatever topic you are covering.
Use these SEO tips to improve the visibility of your site in search engine results.
Keywords
Make sure to include specific keywords in your content so that Google can index it.
It is difficult for a single webpage to rank for more than one search phrase unless you use very similar keywords.
It is unlikely that you will be able to rank for both “student affairs” and “dean of students” or “gender discrimination” and “violence reporting procedures” with a single page.
If you want to rank for multiple keyword phrases with your website, you will need to create separate web pages for each keyword phrase you are targeting. This will ensure that your website is relevant to the search terms that users are entering into search engines.
Placing Keywords
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, ask yourself the following questions:
- Can I use part or all of the keyword phrases in the page URL?
- Can I use part or all of the keyword phrases in the page title?
- Can I use part or all of the keyword phrases in page headings and subheadings?
If you answer yes to these questions, you can improve your search engine ranking. However, it is important to remain natural and user-friendly.
For instance, you don’t want to stuff the word “engineering” into your URL or have the phrase “Northern Lights” repeated in your page title and every heading. While it’s important to optimize your website for search engines, it’s also crucial to focus on readability and usability.
Content
Content is the most influential factor in SEO.
Use your keywords in your content. Make sure they’re used once or twice in the opening and closing paragraph, and a few more times throughout the rest of the text.
As an authoritative source, it is important to link to relevant information both within your organization’s website and on other useful websites. By doing this, you provide valuable resources for your readers and improve your credibility.
Be sure to use bold, italics, heading tags, and other emphasis tags to highlight important keyword phrases. However, don’t go overboard with it. You want your language and writing style to appear natural.
Don’t sacrifice good writing for the sake of SEO. The best pages are written with the user in mind, not just for the search engine.
2. Update Your Content Regularly
Content is king.
One of the best ways to ensure that your site is viewed as relevant is to keep your content regularly updated. You should audit your content on a set schedule (quarterly for example) and make updates as needed. This will help keep your site fresh and engaging for visitors.
Blogging Boosts Search Engine Rankings
If you want to improve your search engine rankings, one way to do so is by writing additional content for your departmental news blog. This content should be rich with keyword phrases that are relevant to the topics you are targeting. Keep in mind that blog posts don’t have to be long; shorter updates can be just as effective.
If you want to improve your search engine rankings, then interlink your related CMS webpages and blog posts. This will help give the reader a better picture or additional information about the topic, which is what search engines are looking for.
3. Optimize Your Metadata
When building a website, each web page contains spaces where you can add metadata or information about the page. If you have a content management system website, the UMC Web Team will have already populated this information for you.
However, you need to review and update metadata as your site changes over time. This will ensure that your site’s visitors have the best experience possible.
Page Title Metadata
The title tag is the most important piece of on-page SEO.
The web team has developed an automated system for creating the meta title for each webpage based on your page title. This is important because it allows you to use well-thought-out page titles that are rich with keyword phrases.
Description Metadata
The meta description is the short text that shows up in search results. Think of it as a storefront window. It’s what entices people to come in.
A well-written description for your page should include at least two complete sentences that are keyword rich. While search engines may not always use your descriptions, it’s smart to give them the option to.
Keyword Metadata
Keyword metadata is not used by search engines to rank pages. However, it is still beneficial to include keyword phrases in this metadata since you should already know them. This will help ensure your website is properly optimized.
Try to include 3-7 different phrases with 1-4 words each.
4. Build Links
A content-rich, authoritative, and unbiased webpage is most likely to attract links from other websites, improving your search engine optimization. By helping visitors learn more about what they are interested in, you can improve your authority and credibility.
Adding links to your texts is a great way to improve your authority. Instead of just having “click” or “here”, write out the destination.
“Click here” has no search engine value beyond the attached URL, whereas “Michigan Tech Enterprise Program” is rich with keywords and will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.
Always use descriptive links by linking keywords—it not only improves search engine optimization but also adds value to your readers, including those with disabilities or who are using screen readers.
5. Use Alt Tags
Always describe your image and video media using alt tags, or alternative text descriptions. They allow search engines to locate your page, which is crucial—especially for those who use text-only browsers or screen readers.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO works by optimizing a website’s content, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links to increase that content’s ranking and the website’s visibility.
While you can generally see results take effect on the SERP once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine, SEO efforts can take months to fully materialize.
Rankings
This is what search engines use to determine where to place a particular web page in the SERP.
Rankings start at position number zero through the final number of search engine results for the query, and a web page can rank for one position at a time.
As time passes, a web page’s ranking might change due to age, competition in the SERP, or algorithm changes by the search engine itself.
Visibility
This term describes how prominent a particular domain is in the search engine results. Lower search visibility occurs when a domain isn’t visible for many relevant search queries whereas, with higher search visibility, the opposite is true.
Both search engine visibility and domain authority are responsible for delivering the main SEO objectives of traffic and domain authority.
Why is SEO Important?
There is one more important reason why you should be using SEO: The strategy virtually helps you position your brand throughout the entire buying journey.
SEO can help you to better understand the new buying behavior so that your marketing strategies can be more effective.
Because, as Google admitted, customer behavior has changed for good.
As of June 2021, 92% of internet searches happen on a Google property.
What’s more, they prefer going through the majority of the buying process on their own.
For example, 60% of people research a brand online before making a purchase.
DemandGen’s 2022 B2B Buyer’s Survey found that 67% of B2B buyers start the buying process with a broad web search.
But how do they use search engines during the process?
Early in the process, they use Google to find information about their problem. Some also inquire about potential solutions.
Then, they evaluate available alternatives based on reviews or social media hype before inquiring about a company. But this happens after they’ve exhausted all information sources.
And so, the only chance for customers to notice and consider you is by showing up in their search results.
9 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing SEO Ranking
Content marketing for SEO ranking is still a major priority for marketers across brands.
When was the last time you searched for anything online, be it business insights or hotel reviews, without going to Google?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 62% of content marketers look at their website traffic when measuring success.
Additionally, 39% believe that content marketing SEO rankings are crucial.
Despite the importance of SEO, content marketers still have trouble mastering it. It requires them to tip toe around Google’s frequently shifting guidelines, and approach the goal of ranking high from a variety of angles.
No set method’s been mastered; instead, content marketers have to throw a bunch of darts and hope they hit the bullseye.
The only way to have a chance at ranking high is to keep up with Google’s standards and find out what has worked for others.
1. Write Original High-Quality Content
Google’s algorithms are always looking for the highest quality content based upon the relevant terms that searchers are inputting. Google crawls through websites and determines relevancy based upon keywords that appear on them.
The search engine figures out whether a website is high-quality or not if other high-quality sites link to your website. Plus, it looks at the amount of engagement from users with your website, and how much content on your site is distinctive.
Engagement means, are they clicking on you in a search engine and immediately returning to their search? Or are they staying on your page for a distinct amount of time and perhaps pursuing more content there?
When it comes to content, marketers should focus on quality, not quantity.
People are fixated on quantity, which is a 2012 SEO strategy.
You should use a relevant keyword in the title of your content, but don’t try and grab someone’s attention with clickbait. Instead, think about how you can answer a question relevant to your consumer base while incorporating keywords relevant to your brand.
Writing long-form content, especially when you’re initially trying to rank high, is more effective than content that’s light on word count.
Study after study has shown that long-form content performs quite well with Google as well as audiences.
When people are first starting with content marketing on their blogs, start with long-form content.
In terms of length, we recommend 1,500 to 3,000 words per post with visual assets. These include images and videos peppered throughout the content that can be helpful to the readers.
Images and videos are important because they decrease the likelihood of a person leaving your page quickly. If someone goes to your site and only browses for 30 seconds before leaving, and this occurs often, it means you might have a high bounce rate.
Long-form content that is broken up with visuals, headers, and bullet points will draw in your prospects.
2. Optimize Your URLs
Along with putting keywords in the titles of your website’s content, place them in your URLs as well.
When a person hovers over anchor text, they will see that the website is actually relevant based on the URL. If there is no anchor text, then they will not recognize the relevance within the text.
Plus, URLs show up on Google and help people decide whether or not to click on your website. If the title matches the URL, they’re going to trust it and go to your website.
The URL should be short (50 to 60 characters or less) and as readable as possible. Avoid having anything but words and dashes within your URLs.
A bunch of numbers, symbols, and random letters confuse people and discourage them from clicking.
Even if the title of your content has words like “the,” “and,” or “a” in it, you don’t need to include them in the URL for it to still be coherent.
Finally, don’t use too many slashes within your URL.
3. Optimize With SEO Keywords
Keywords need to appear within the title of your content, as well as in the body of it. While SEO used to be all about the keywords, it’s since expanded into broader territories.
Still, keywords are very important.
To effectively utilize keywords, you must first do your research and find ones that’ll apply to your content. This must be an ongoing practice and not something you do one time.
Keyword popularity is always changing, and you have to keep up with it to rank high.
When deciding what keywords to use, brands can run free searches on sites like keyword Tool.
On it, you’re able to see which keywords are popular so that you can then integrate them into your content.
WordStream, which provides ideas for keywords related to whatever keyword you input, is also useful.
For example, if you type in “content marketing,” other popular keywords include, “original marketing content services” and “how big is a content marketing agency”.
You don’t want to use keywords too many times within your content, or else Google will think you’re spammy (so will your readers). If you don’t use them enough, Google won’t know what your site is about.
Use keywords naturally within your content and not force them in there.
A good rule of thumb is to include your keywords in the first 200 words of your content, and one time within the first 160 characters of the meta description of the page.
Along with existing in your written content, keywords should be integrated into your optimized images.
Your keywords need to be built into your logo and header images, as well as your buttons and graphics on your site in your alt image text.
4. Design With The User in Mind
If you want users to be engaged, you need to design your website so that it’s easy to navigate and user-friendly. Make sure that your site has:
- Attractive visuals
- Good color contrast
- Logical navigation
- Call to action at the end of content
- Readable fonts
- Content in segmented sections
- Visible search bar
- White space
Your site also needs to be responsive to all different types of devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This means that it resizes and adjusts itself to the device that it’s being viewed on.
Mobile-friendliness is key because mobile devices are what many consumers use when deciding whether or not they’ll make purchases.
If you want users-on-the-go to click on your website link on Google, as well as spend a decent amount of time browsing through it, you should get your business to show up on the local search section and make sure that your site is loading fast enough.
5. Delete Duplicate Pages
Duplicate pages can be a big problem for your ranking. This is because the wrong page might get indexed, and Google will split link metrics between different versions of the page instead of attributing it only to one.
Duplicate pages can be caused by a number of factors. Perhaps you use them for click tracking or you provide a printer-friendly version of your page on your website.
To remedy this issue, canonicalize your duplicate pages by using a 301 redirect to the correct page.
If a few pages on your website are naturally similar, write more content on each of them. That way, they’ll be distinctive to Google and your site will receive more clicks all around.
6. Find Helpful Tools
There are a variety of tools on the web that can assist you with the search engine optimization process. Some of the best ones are:
- BuzzSumo
- Google Search Console
- BrowserStack
- Google Trends
- Alexa
- SEOptimer
- Moz
7. Make Valuable Connections
You can produce great long-form content that is rich with images and links to credible websites. However, if you’re not actively promoting your content and seeking distribution on high-quality websites, it’s not going to be seen.
Run BuzzSumo to find and contact bloggers and journalists in your target niche. When you’ve created some great content or published a new press release, send them an email or message on social media. Explain how this new information can benefit their readers.
If these are bloggers, consider pitching them stories on industry trends or offering them an interview with one of your company’s top leaders.
Reach out to your industry’s most influential bloggers and ask if they’ll let you write a guest post for them. Make sure to write quality, unique content that relates to your brand.
8. Speed Up Loading Time
A slow loading time is going to lead to a high bounce rate whether users are on desktop computers or their mobile devices.
Aside from following the aforementioned rules for mobile, there are some other strategies you can use to make sure your site quickly loads.
Start at Google’s PageSpeed Insights. On this site, you can type in the URL for your website and see what your load speed is, out of 100.
Google will tell you what you need to improve to make your site load faster on mobile and desktop devices.
For example, they may recommend optimizing images for both platforms, as well as minifying HTML and CSS.
The rules are generally the same for both mobile and desktop. The difference is just that you can have bigger images, flash, and more intricate designs on your desktop page.
9. Invest in SEO
Some content marketers think that they can achieve business results with a high ranking from organic linking and traffic, and discard the need to use paid promotion as well. In reality, both are required to succeed.
Whether you’re paying for a press release distribution service, taking out native ads on high-quality websites, or hiring an outside firm to handle your SEO, realize that all of these efforts are an investment in your company.
There is only so far you can get with organic.
Paid promotion has great potential to spread your company’s message and help you reach your core audience.
When looking into firms to help you boost your rankings, it’s important that you already know the bare bones of SEO. You will make a much better hiring decision if you at least know the basics.
To avoid wasting your time and resources, before you sign up with a firm, ask to see examples of sites that the firm has gotten placement for their clients on in the past.
If your SEO agency can’t get you on sites like the Huffington Post, then they are doing it wrong.
Start ranking high on Google.
SEO can seem confusing, but these techniques have been proven to help with ranking. By utilizing them, you’ll have a better chance of reaching your audience, making connections with prospects, and getting them started in your purchase funnel.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for how to increase SEO ranking, there are several things you can do. From optimizing your website for specific keywords to writing quality content, there are many ways to improve your search engine optimization. Hopefully, these tips have given you some ideas on how to increase your SEO ranking.
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