Do you want 1,000 organic clicks a day to your website?
How about 10,000, or perhaps even more?
If you want to get a lot of traffic to your website, you need to rank high in Google’s search results.
What Does It Mean to “Rank’’ on Google?
Google ranking is the process of getting your website listed in the search results when someone searches for a term or question. This is a fundamental goal for most website owners as it opens up opportunities to gain a large amount of traffic to your site.
There’s a catch, though.
Think about how many times you’ve gone to the fifth page of Google’s results. How often do you even make it to the second page?
In order to be seen by the majority of people searching, it is important to be in the top 10 search results, as these are the ones that appear on page one. A blog that is not within this range is unlikely to be clicked on.
It is important to rank in the top 10 search results on Google because that is where most of the traffic comes from.
Tips on How to Get Your Blog to Rank in Google’s Top 10
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Research what’s currently ranking in the Top 10 results for the keywords you want to rank on
Google should rank your blog in the top 10 because it is a high-quality blog that provides useful information to its readers.
It desires to propel individuals to dependable websites that satisfy their questions antagonistically.
If you write about different topics, Google may question your expertise. Write about topics that are focused on your area of expertise and the information your audience is looking for.
This is where your keyword research comes in.
Ubersuggest is a tool that allows you to see how people search on Google, which can give you ideas about what kind of content to write. For example, if you search for “investment banking,” you might also find related keywords like “investment banking salary,” “investment banking analyst,” and “investment banking jobs.”
Once you’ve made a list of relevant keywords, then it’s time to check out your competition. Through Ubersuggest, or by typing the keywords into Google, you can analyze the results that already feature in the top 10 to find out what makes them successful:
- How long is the content?
- What topics do they discuss?
- What type of domain are they (if they’re .edu, they can be difficult to beat)?
Google ranks pages using a complicated algorithm. By looking at the competition, you can get an idea of the factors Google looks for when ranking pages. You can then use these same factors to improve your own ranking by creating similar, but unique content.
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Optimize for on-page SEO
On-page SEO is how you optimize your website to make it more likely to rank on search engines. This includes things like choosing the right keywords, structuring your HTML, and making sure your site is accessible to search engine crawlers.
One of the most important aspects of blogging is providing value to the reader. However, you also need to make sure that value is conveyed to the search engines. Google is not human, so it does not interpret content in the same way as your readers. In some ways, it has its own language, and your blog needs to be able to communicate properly with it if you want it to rank in the top 10 search results.
In the past decade or so, Google’s algorithms have become much better at understanding the meaning of words (semantics). However, if you want to rank for a particular keyword, you need to use it and show Google that the word is central to your content.
You can do this by including keywords in:
- headers
- meta descriptions
- image files
- page content
- alt text
- URL
Keywords are important, but don’t forget that your users are more important. Overstuffing keywords will make your text difficult to read and will turn off human readers.
Google understands the importance of user experience, so a big part of your on-page SEO is making sure you tick these boxes. People want a clean and fast user experience, so it’s important to take care of the following as well:
- don’t keyword stuff
- optimize images
- break your page down into easy-to-read sections
- avoid thin content
Optimizing your on-page SEO is important in order to ensure your blog’s success.
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Optimize for technical SEO
The number one thing that drives people mad about a website is its slow speed.
Do you find that the website loads slowly? Do the buttons on the screen move around when you’re about to click them?
There are some common user experience errors that can cause people to leave your page without engaging with the content.
Google wants its users to have a positive experience, so it looks at factors that could cause displeasure, such as how long a page takes to load. As a result, you need to make sure your website is optimized for users in order to prevent any negative feedback.
There are a lot of tools available to help improve your website and show you how Google views your site. Programs like Ubersuggest and Google Lighthouse can provide important insights into your site’s performance and how to fix any issues.
This task may seem daunting and complicated to some people, but it is a crucial part of making your blog more visible in search engines.
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SEO-friendly blog design
Creating a well-designed website is important for search engine ranking as much as site architecture and high-quality content.
This is true, but what factors should you be paying attention to? To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of nine proven elements of good blog design that also improve your search engine rankings.
- Keep important content above the fold
This is not surprising, and some might even argue that it is not that important because people are used to scrolling. However, from my own tests and the tests of others, I have seen this proven to be true again and again. So, keep the important information in the top 768 pixels. Research has shown that people do scroll, but they actually spend most of their time looking at information that is above the fold, and only a small amount of time looking at information below the fold.
I don’t like sliders because they’re often confusing to users. When a users arrives on a page and the first thing they see is a slider, they have to start looking for what they’re supposed to be doing.
That’s never a good user experience.
This means that if you use a slider, it should be the most prominent thing on your website or blog.
- Keep the number of links on a page under 100
Google does not recommend having more than 100 links on a single page for design and user experience reasons, not for search purposes. This is evidenced by Matt Cutts publishing a page with close to 200 links on it.
Google recommends limiting the number of links on a page to 100 because in the past Google would only index up to 100 kilobytes of a page, and that is approximately the same number of links. However, now Google can index pages that are much larger.
If you place more than 100 links on a page, Google may investigate and view you as a spammer.
Even if what you’re doing is legitimate, and having a lot of links can work if it’s justified, you’ll only pass on a limited amount of PageRank because there are so many links on that page.
It is more important to create a good user experience on a website than to worry about things like PageRank or SEO. This means that it is a good idea to limit the number of links on a page to 100.
- Limit your ad space
It’s clear that you need to use fewer ads on your blog if you want it to have good SEO. Too many ads will make your blog load slowly, which will reduce traffic.
If you use ads, it is important to only use a few so that people do not get annoyed. You should look at your analytics to see which ads are the best performing and only use those.
- Design your site for speed
After that, you should take a look at your site speed. Faster searches have been shown to make users happier. Google found that if you slow down search results by 400 milliseconds, the number of searches will go down by half a percent.
Although page relevance is more important to SEO than page speed, speed is still a necessary element to address. Slow pages can cause a number of problems, so it’s important to try to fix as manyspeed-related issues as possible.
- Keep your images small
It is better to save images as .jpgs because they take up less space and download faster, which increases site speed. If an image is not a .jpg, use a tool to save it as one.
- Design your navigation for UX and SEO
So, a simple, straightforward navigation is crucial to search success. It is important for both your user and for search engines that your website has a clear and easy-to-use navigation. Search engines use the navigation to help them understand the structure of the site, just as they would use a site map. So, having a simple and straightforward navigation system is important for achieving success in search engine results.
A user navigates around a site using its navigation system. I have seen many cases where the user experience is better than search because developers have used javascript or Flash to build the navigation system. However, this is a bad idea because search engines cannot index the content of the site if the navigation is built using these technologies.
Instead of using a responsive design framework, you should use standard HTML and CSS to get the best of both worlds.
- Use breadcrumbs
It’s easy for a user to be overwhelmed by an array of links, and a well-strategized breadcrumb will show them the steps they should follow. Breadcrumbs are useful for both users and search engines. Users find them useful to help them locate where they are on your site. Search engines find them useful to understand the structure of your site.
- Build beauty into your web design
As more and more people use sentiment search engines, the user experience will become increasingly important in determining how high a website ranks.
If someone finds your blog through a search engine and then leaves because they don’t like what they see, that’s a mark against you. Google, for example, will ask the user if they want to block that search result. If they choose to block it, you won’t show up in that person’s search results anymore.
to design your site to attract and keep users is important if you want Google to keep your site up high on the search results. If users bounce off your site and back to the search results, Google is likely to count it against you.
- Crawl and validate your site
When it comes to optimizing your website for search engines, you need to periodically review your site to determine where you stand in terms of search engine friendliness.
What should you test and how? You must validate:
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- Accessibility (Section 508 and WAI Standards)
- Dead links
- Feeds
- Multiple browsers
- Multiple devices
After you test and identify all the problems, prioritize them, fix them, and then test again. Fix any remaining problems, and then have family and friends test the site to get feedback from users.
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Get Backlinks
If your next-door neighbor tells you to buy stocks in BMW this week, you will probably ask them why, and then do your own research to see if other people are saying the same thing.
Google evaluates the trustworthiness of your blog by looking at the links from other websites to your pages. This is known as your link profile. In order for your blog to be considered trustworthy, your link profile must be made up of links from high-quality, reputable websites.
A third person joins the discussion, agreeing with the first two that investing in BMW is a good idea. This third person is a smart guy and his opinion might hold some weight.
While you’re talking, Warren Buffett walks by and tells you that you should buy stock in BMW. This recommendation is significant because he’s a well-known and successful investor.
Google will trust your information more if you have more people linking to you, and if those people are authoritative.
Google’s algorithm is getting better and better at understanding the meaning of the content, but backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors.
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