3 Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Rankings
What can you do to improve your search rankings?
Everyone wants to improve their SEO rankings to end up on the “first page” of Google's search results. You might hire or contract a SEO expert, but what can you do yourself? You can actually do quite a bit, and we’ll show you some helpful Sitefinity features to assist you. Here are 3 tips on how to improve your search engine rankings:
Create Content that People Want to Read
Rule number one: create content for people, not search engines. The question to ask yourself is, "what will my target audience find interesting and relevant?" Then, when evaluating the content on a specific page, ask yourself "what question does this page answer?" You might consider what someone might enter in a search engine, and have a response in your page.
The main idea is to engage readers and get them to share your content.
Once you’re done writing, optimize your content with a meaningful page title and interesting header tags. Don’t forget to add names and alt tags to your images. To learn more about using proper header tags, click here.
Don’t limit your creativity – Quality blog posts, videos, infographics, and listicles all can bring users and engaged readers equal rankings.
What about Keywords?
You don’t want to cram a bunch of unrelated keywords into the page. In fact, you might want to think of one keyword that a page is about, and use it in your title, page description, and organically in your content. (If you’ve written your content correctly, you keyword will probably already be in the page.)
Links Out, Links In
Build traffic by linking out to other valuable, relevant content. This might seem counter intuitive, but if readers click your links, this tells search engines you are a trusted authority (the better the content you’re linking to, the more it will help). Don’t overdo this, however. If your pages or other content are full of irrelevant links, your rankings will suffer.
In the other direction, links to your content imply it’s trusted. Search engines consider such links as votes of confidence. The more authoritative the site linking to you, the better. How do you get links like these? The answer is creating your own high quality content. If you build it, links will follow.
What about Social Media shares?
These don’t carry the same weight as links, but you shouldn’t dismiss them – and someone your site was shared with might link back to it.
Using the SF SEO Tools
What makes a good title?
- You should aim to write title tags that are about 55 to 60 characters long. This way, title tags this length shouldn’t get truncated on mobile.
- Title tags should reflect the content of that specific page. Avoid titles like “Home” or “About” as the main keyword for the page
Page descriptions
- If you are going to add a description, make sure it’s unique to the page
- Descriptions should be between 50–160 characters long. Think of this like an ad selling this page.
SEO is something you can achieve on your own, without the help of an external vendor. If you have questions, or would like additional resources, reach out to your friendly Vanguard Client Manager to be pointed in the right direction!