Before getting frustrated about your poor page ranking on Google or any other search engines, you need to make sure your primary consideration in designing and formatting your website is accomplished. In short, you need to have a good website before showing it to the world, or else every SEO effort is useless as searchers will immediately leave your page and try a different link.
When you are confident about your website, it’s time to gain position 0 where your short content and web link are showed in the Answer Box above organic results on Google. In this case, you are trying to answer queries for searchers when they search “what is…”, and ultimately to gain traffic and conversions on your landing page. For general keyword search, it is important to do some tactical steps to make sure your page is on the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) or at least rank on page 1.
1. Accessible URLs
The very first thing is to have accessible URLs to your webpage so that Google can easily access, understanding your content and put it into their web index.
2. Keyword research
To know what searchers are looking for when they type queries, you need to do keyword research. This is extremely important to remove your irrelevant content and replace it by correct answers. Here, a primary keyword together with related secondary keywords are highly needed to target your audience.
3. Maximizing relevance
You want your webpage to rank well, then you must provide an entire relevant setting in which URL, title tag, header tags, main content, image, video, file name, and internal links share the same or related content to a search phrase. Also, consider where to repeat the search phrase in your page to maximize your relevance score.
4. Meta description, snippets and title tag
Meta description the short description of your webpage content that is displayed together with title tag on search engines. A well-written meta description and a compelling title tag can efficiently contribute to the click-through rate. You also need to see how Google snippet displays on search results to have the best combination of headline, URL, description and other additional information. Again, all elements need to be relevant to the search keyword.
5. Mobile optimization
To take advantage of users of mobile devices, your webpage needs to optimize mobile-friendly design. This is important to track conversion on your landing page, and thus, rank your page higher compared to a less mobile-friendly page as users will not waste their time struggling with the inconvenience. Remember, you want to track as many users as possible, therefore, do not neglect the impact of mobile devices.
6. Page speed optimization
Your webpage needs to be fast enough to save searchers’ time and goal in an efficient and convenient way. This is also an impression that people tend to have connection with your page after a fast click and the click, in turns, quickly leads them to a relevant and well-designed webpage.
7. Regular updating
If you do not regularly update your page with up-to-date information, its rank will drop. The digital era enables us to update as much as we can. When you are confident with above tactics, updating your webpage should not be a difficult task.
8. Backlinks
Backlink is a link from other webpages that refer to your page. This unpaid channel is extremely convenient to direct prospective users to your page, thus increase your ranking on search engines.
References:
A Little More Detail On Google Snippets. https://www.predikkta.com/help/definitions/google-snippet.html
Digital Marketing Essentials (Larson & Draper), Chapter 4: On-Site SEO.
Expert Interview: Position 0 and The Answer Box. https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/0_7in427is
How to Improve Your Page Rank. https://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Page-Rank
Whiteboard Friday – How to Rank in 2018: The SEO Checklist. https://moz.com/blog/rank-in-2018-seo-checklist
9 Important Tips On How To Increase Website Ranking In 2020. https://thekeyideas.com/website-ranking/
13 Super-Easy Ways to Immediately Improve Your SEO Rankings. https://www.jeffbullas.com/13-super-easy-ways-to-immediately-improve-your-seo-ranking/