There are over 1 billion websites in the world nowadays, and that’s just a rough estimate. Getting your website noticed can be tough, especially when you don’t have the resources for promoting it. However, making your new website rank well on Google is not as hard as it seems. Google has become smarter and smarter, and as a result, it knows how to sift out valuable content. All you need to do is give it a little bit of help.
Make Sure You Have Everything Ready For Business
It may seem like a fairly obvious point, but because of this, many new website owners fail because they overlook it. We all know anyone with an internet connection can create a website, and by the large that’s true. But if you really want to make a profit, you need to make sure your internet connection is ready to handle the task. You should check to see if your internet provider has special packages for businesses of different sizes. You can also try to switch to an internet provider that does.
Hardware can also become an obstacle when you’re trying to grow your site. Creating images for your website (more on that later) can drain your computer’s resources. And it can get frustrating if it freezes up every 5 seconds. It’s best if you sort out possible hardware issues beforehand. Because once you’ve made your website public, you can’t really afford to take a break to update your work.
Use Simple Analytics Tools Once a Month
Analyzing how your website is doing is the first thing (or the last, depending on how you think about it) you need to do to make sure it’s ranking well. Without the proper tools to follow relevant metrics, you can’t really optimize your website. There are a lot of different factors that determine whether or not your website ranks well and it would be impossible to manually check them all.
Google Webmaster Tools is a user-friendly ranking analyzer tool that can give most of the information you will need. It’s free and easy to use, and it gives you insights straight from the source. To get a better feel of how your site looks on Google you can also use HubSpot’s Website Gradertool. Compare and contrast the results to spot patterns and areas that need improvement.
One important point to make on this subject is on timing. Specifically, you should perform these checks about once every month. More often than that and you might get the impression that your website isn’t growing, or it’s growing too slowly. You run the risk of obsessing over metrics, instead of focusing on the content of your website. And that’s not going to help.
Post Diligently
There are no clear rules about how often you should post new content on your website, but most studies show posting new content at least every other day is best. However, with the new Google Panda update, there is one very important thing you should note regarding post frequency.
Google is now smarter when it comes to websites that are merely trying to drive up traffic and increase ranking. That means that if you post much too often, your website can end up getting flagged. And there are a host of other reasons why it may be smarter to actually cut down on content creation.
That’s why you should post new content ‘diligently’, not ‘frequently’. Having a clear post schedule is going to help your audience know when it’s time to check for updates, and it’s going to help you organize your work. And it’s going to push your website rank up the smart way.
Include One Image For Every Post
Anyone who’s interested in SEO and webpage optimization has probably heard that images tend to make posts much more popular. It seems content that includes images or other media just tends to higher ranked that posts that are all text.
Common wisdom would thus dictate that the more images you have, the better your post is going to do. But it seems that’s not the case. One study showed that pages which included an image faired better than those which didn’t. But pages with more than one image did not significantly outrank those with just one.
So unless the content of the post demands (for example, if you have a how-to guide that requires visual illustrations) you are better off posting just one featured image and leave it at that. It’s also important to note that alt texts don’t have a very great impact on your page rank, so just keep it simple.
Simplify Your Pages
One of the most important factors that determine the rank of your website is load speed. This is one of the few factors that has remained unchanged, even after the Google engine’s numerous updates. Both Google and users avoid websites that are too slow to load. And it makes sense. How much time would you be willing to wait for a page to load? It seems the average user gives up after just 2 seconds.
This is why you should work hard on keeping your page as simple as possible. Plugins have a tendency to slow down load speeds, so stick to the ones you can’t do without and remove the clutter.
Images can also slow down a page dramatically. High quality, large images in particular. You can use compression tools that are freely available online, like TinyJpg to maintain the quality of the picture and reduce its size.
And considering that more than one image doesn’t do much to improve your rank, it may be worthwhile to reduce the number of pictures per post, as the more you have, the longer it’s going to take to load them all up.
Nothing Beats Quality Content
With all of the metrics and statistics to look at, one thing is still abundantly clear. There’s nothing like quality content to drive up Google rank. Relevant, insightful content that provides useful information to readers consistently outranks content that is just there for the sake of making a website look nice.
What defines quality content depends on a lot of factors. The niche it’s directed at, the audience it is intended for, what it offers that other similar content doesn’t, all of these things affect content quality.
Always remember your website is intended for people, not matter what you are using your website for. Whether it’s a regular blog or a retail website, you need to put yourself in your readers’ shoes and imagine what they would look for in a website like yours. All of the other metrics are there as guidelines and suggestions.
Making your website rank better on Google is more art than hard science. Despite the many useful tools and metrics you can use to assess your site’s performance, you’re still going to have to experiment a little bit until you get the formula just right.
Good luck!
