How to Use Your Website to Improve Search Results

Want your website to rank higher on search engine results pages? You have come to the right place.

In this article, we’re going to walk you through optimizing your website so you can get the search engine results you want. As you go through, the following tips will provide a good foundation that you can keep building on over the years.

• Make Your Website About One Thing
• Customize Page and Site Titles
• Use Keywords Strategically
• Link to Internal Pages on Your Site
• Update Content Regularly

Make Your Website About One Thing

Ok, this may be a little bit basic, but keep your website simple. You may be interested in interior design, skeet shooting, astrophysics, and making pancakes, but those things certainly do not all belong on one website together.

Your visitors, and Google, will be confused if your content is all over the place. To show up in search engine results, you need to be clear about what you do and the products you offer. Otherwise, the search engines won’t know how to match your site up with the appropriate queries.

Customize Page and Site Titles

Search engines usually prioritize site titles, page titles, blog post titles, and headings (in that order). These titles also show up in search results, so it’s important to use wording that is clear and concise for both search engines and potential visitors.

For example, the default title for an image gallery is likely “gallery,” but if you want to let search engines know what you do, you might want to be more descriptive. Try something like “Dogs available for adoption” or “Easy kid-friendly craft” (or whatever is relevant to your business).

Most website builders should offer you a way to change your titles and headlines fairly easily. WordPress, for example, makes it simple to the text, size, and style of font, add decoration (such as underline), change the parsing configuration, and more.

Use Keywords Strategically

When you use keywords on your website, it’s important to use them in a natural way, just as you would in conversation. Whatever you do, do not jam in keywords or phrases wherever you can just to rank higher. It’s not only annoying for your visitors, but it’ll actually have a negative effect on SEO.

This practice, known as “keyword stuffing,” is highly frowned upon by Google. Examples include:

• Blocks of text listing cities and states a page is trying to rank for
• Lists of phone numbers without added value
• Repeating the same words or phrases so often it sounds unnatural

Link to Internal Pages on Your Site

This process, known as backlinking, links to other pages within your website. For instance, you might insert links for one or two related articles into each blog post. It’s beneficial for SEO because it helps keep visitors on your site longer – and it’s beneficial for the visitors themselves because it directs them to other information they may enjoy.

Update Content Regularly

Add new content on a regular basis or, at a minimum, update the content that’s already there. When you make changes to your website, search engines can see that it’s active and will rank it higher than a page that never does anything.

When creating blog posts, make sure to use tags and categories, and to use headings and subheadings within the formatting of your post. This will help search engines determine what each post is about so they can rank it appropriately.

Note: when you write, make sure your content is technically good (free of grammar and spelling errors), but also make sure you sound like a real person.