Being indexed by Search Engines is easy… Getting your web page up in the SERP (search engine results page) of Google can sometimes be a little harder. In this article, I touch on the most important things to remember when designing your website for search engines.
Register your site with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service from Google that allows you to submit your website and its sitemap to Google for indexing.
No matter whether you’re using Shopify, WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace, adding your website to this service is the starting point for good SEO.
By submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console you are telling the search engines that your website exists.
Google search console
That’s not all you can do with Google Search Console though — you can use the tool to do a lot of other useful things, including:
- checking who is linking to your site (external links are very important to the performance of a site in Google search results)
- ensuring that Google is not experiencing any crawl errors with your site
- letting Google know if different versions of your websites exist for different countries.
- viewing the kinds of search queries that are driving traffic to your site.
- telling Google when you’ve updated a piece of content so that the fresh version can be displayed in search results more quickly.
The Google Search Console help pages are a great starting point to understanding how the tool can help you maximize visibility for your site in search results.
2. Register your site with Google My Business
Registering your business on Google My Business can help it appear in relevant geographic search results.
When you do this, Google will send a postcard containing a pin to your business address – you can use this to verify your business with Google.
This verification lets Google know that your business genuinely operates in the physical location you specified, meaning that you have a stronger chance of appearing in search results – and on Google Maps – for people who are searching for a business like yours in the area in which you operate.
If, for example, you run a web development business in Mayfair, London, and somebody with a Mayfair IP address enters a search phrase of ‘web design Queens’ or even ‘web design’ into Google, you may surprise yourself by popping up in a higher-than-expected position in search results.
Google my business
Google My Business is a massive part of local SEO, and if your business relies on attracting customers in your own area, registering on this service is absolutely vital.
.Remember: keep your Google My Business entry up to date
Once you’ve registered on Google My Business, it’s very important to keep your entry up to date.So, if your Google My Business entry contains incorrect information (like incorrect opening hours or an old telephone number), then this is going to work against you.
Tip: Encourage happy customers to review your business on Google — having some nice stars beside your business name can increase click-through rate, something that many SEO experts believe can have a positive effect on search results Google star reviews.
3.Make your website load as fast as it can, particularly on mobile devices
Google has been using site speed as a ranking signal since 2010
accordingly, it’s important to ensure that your site is loading as fast as possible.
This means that you should:
- minimize the number of HTTPS requests on your site — this means keeping use of scripts to a minimum and using images only when they are genuinely beneficial to your content
- ensure your image file sizes are as small as they can be (you can use image compression tools like Tiny Png to help you compress them with minimal loss of picture quality)
- use fast hosting.
- Getting page speed insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can help you find ways to improve the loading times of your website.
Pingdom’s Website Speed Test site is also a good resource for identifying aspects of your website that are slowing it down.
Using these tools will help you see how fast your site is loading and provide you with a report containing a checklist of things that you need to do to help you speed up your website’s performance
4.Identify the right keywords
Identify the right keywords to use — and add them to your headings, page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs
It’s important to identify the best keywords — phrases that you want to rank for in search results — for your site and to make sure that they've added to it in the right way.
This involves finding out three key pieces of information:
- the keywords that people are using to search for products or services like yours.
- the volume of searches for each of them.
- how difficult it will be to rank for each.
the keyword is based on how many existing authoritative sites or pages already perform well in search results for those keywords.
When you have these three pieces of information, you can usually identify the phrase (or phrases) to optimize your content for.
keywords that are popular enough to generate a reasonably large amount of traffic, without being so popular that there are already lots of other websites dominating search results for them.
To get your hands on this data, you’ll need to use a dedicated keyword research tool like Mangools these let you enter keywords and provide you with all the above stats for each one.
For help with keyword research:
Subscribe now to access an extended free trial of Mangools here.
Adding your keywords to your site:
Once you’ve identified the most appropriate keywords, you need to make sure that they've added to the right places on your website.
You should add them to:
- page titles — the text displayed in search results as the clickable headline for a given result.
- meta descriptions — a page description that is presented in search results as the main summary of the content.
- headings — the ‘signpost’ headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.) that guide readers through an article.
- page content — the main copy of your page.
- your URLs – the address of the page, i.e., www.yourdomain.com/page-name
Google uses all these elements in various ways to index your content and determine whether it is relevant to searches for your preferred keywords.
Avoid being spammy by stuffing all the above with too many keywords, however, because this can:
actively damage your chances of appearing high in search results
make your site appear off-putting or ‘cheap looking’ to users who come across it during searches.
When it comes to URLs, using ‘clean’ URLs with a simple structure is encouraged by Google.
- Clean URLs are short, simple, and intelligible: as an example, if you were selling yellow bags, it would be advisable to use a URL of http://www.yourdomain.com/yellow-bags rather than www.yourdomain.com/prd/p223/ref1456_zblue_cr
- Break up your URLs with punctuation when needed to make keywords more obvious to both Google and users as for example www.yourdomain.com/white-watches is better than www.yourdomain.com/whitewatches).
- Use hyphens rather than underscores to denote spaces as for example www.yourdomain.com/yellow-bags is preferred to www.yourdomain.com/yellow _bags).
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5. Create backlinks to your website
Even if you’ve got fantastically well-constructed page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs, they’re usually fairly useless unless you’ve got ‘backlinks’ pointing to your website too.
Backlinks are essentially links from other sites to your site, and in a very simple sense, Google counts them as ‘votes’ for your content.
There are two main ways to generate backlinks:
- via outreach, by asking other site/blog owners to feature links to your content on their sites.
- by creating high-quality, keyword-rich blog posts that are extremely relevant to your business niche (if they are REALLY interesting/helpful articles about your area of business, they are more likely to attract a relevant audience, a proportion of which will create backlinks to them).
Avoid using companies that promise to create thousands of low-quality backlinks for you, however — Google can and will penalize your site if it thinks there is spammy activity going on in this regard.
And remember that links from higher-quality websites count more than those from lower-quality ones — i.e., if you get a link from The Forbes to your website, it will have more impact on your site’s ranking than one from an unknown blog site.
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6. Follow Google’s advice
Google is actually pretty helpful when it comes to advising you how to improve your site’s performance in search results – so helpful in fact, that the company provides a free guide to optimizing your site for Google search.
I hope the above tips have helped you understand how to make your site more visible in Google search results!
However, there are a LOT more steps you can take to improve your search ranking — if you’re interested in finding out more about these, and want to make more substantial improvements to your site’s performance in Google, then do sign up below.
Make your website more visible on search engines summary:
Register your site with Google Search Console.
Register your site with Google My Business.
Make your site load as fast as it can, particularly on mobile devices.
Perform keyword research, and add the right keywords to the right parts of your site.
Create backlinks to your website.
Make use of Google’s free tools and resources.
Any thoughts?
Got any queries about SEO or making your site more visible? Feel free to share them We’ll do our best to help.🙂
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