You want to implement the following on your website to give it the best chance to rank on the first page of Google. By setting up the SEO structure of your site correctly from the outset, getting your site on the first page shouldn’t be a problem. Certain niches will be more difficult to conquer than others, however, with the right foundation strategy, your site should be able to achieve competitive rankings in a matter of months. Link building agency Digital Next recommend the following actions.
Create relevancy on your web pages and across your website
This should be the starting point for your SEO campaign. Although it is possible to rank a website on its backlinks alone, you want to make sure that the onsite factors are optimised for search relevancy.
This means:
- Optimising the title tags with the target keyword across the site’s web pages.
- Optimising your web page’s content to contain targeted keywords within the body of the content.
- Use keyword rich internal linking to other relevant web content on your website.
- Publish supporting content that is relevant to the main content that you want to rank on Google.
- Use Schema markup to alert Google to the type of content that is on your website.
The authority that is signalled to Google will trigger the search engine to rank your website. Google uses links as a form of votes to rank websites higher in the organic search engine results. Many SEOs will talk about the, “weight behind the link”, which refers to the factors Google uses to determine how authoritative a link is.
Previously, these factors were summarised in a website’s Page Rank, however Google stopped updating this metric several years ago. Moz uses their own metrics (Domain and Page Authority) to assess the authority of a website, however you can make draw your own conclusions by looking at the following factors on a website.
Does the website have a large backlink profile?
You can use a backlink checker tool to see how many links and domains are pointing back to the website. Seeing more domains is a positive sign of the website’s popularity, however you should dig deeper to assess the quality of the linking sites.
Are the sites from that backlink profile relevant to the linking site?
This is the most important factor to consider. You want to boost the authority of your site by getting links from other sites whose content is relevant to your own. For example, if your site’s content talks about pumpkin recipes and you start getting links from sites about running shoes, the relevancy will be poor and it is unlikely to give your site a massive boost in rankings. Whereas if you get links from other recipe related websites, it is likely to give your site a natural boost in rankings.
Maintain a well-balanced anchor-text ratio
The anchor text strategy is a sensitive topic in the SEO community. Use too much exact match anchors and your site can get penalised. If you stick to branded keywords, your site will get the authority, but it the keyword movement might stall.
These might sound simple, however many people tend to focus on one area rather than focusing on all of the areas that will make the strategy work. The best way to track your site’s improvements is by taking a benchmark of the site’s rankings and split testing the activity and forcing Google to recrawl the updated version of the website. Over time, you should start to see your site’s rankings improve to the first page of Google.
