Want to rank your content on Google’s 1st page? Here’s a quick list of tips and tricks that you can use to rank your website or blog on Google’s first page
Google Algorithm
Google’s ranking algorithm is pretty complex and the company refuses to share the top factors that determine which content ranks first. To put it another way, no one knows exactly what boxes to check to get a first-page ranking. However, there are some ranking factors that we are aware of:
Page speed: If your website is slow to load, this may negatively affect your ranking on Google. Slow websites provide a poor user experience.
Relevance of content: While you shouldn’t cram your website with keywords, you should use a few that are relevant and generate content around them. Also, if users don’t find what they are looking for, they’ll bounce off in the first few seconds. Google penalizes websites with high bounce rates and little repeat visits.
Website Design: Your website’s design should be user-friendly and simple to browse.
Quality of links: If you want to rank on Google’s first page, make sure you only link to useful, helpful content. It’s possible that irrelevant links will negatively affect your ranking.
Mobile-friendliness: Because Google ranks and indexes websites based on their mobile versions, “mobile-friendliness” is a major ranking criterion.
HTTPS status: Google favors secure websites since they are more reliable. Because HTTPS is more secure than HTTP, obtaining an SSL certificate can improve your search engine ranking.
Simply said, the Google algorithm rewards sites that provide the best user experience. Once we know which factors affect our user’s experience, we can use this information to our advantage and “Trick” Google’s Algorithm. Here are a few things we could do:
1. Make your site mobile-friendly
If you want to improve your ranks, you must optimize your website for mobile users. Google favors websites that are responsive in tablets and mobile devices
To know whether your site is mobile-friendly, open your website in various devices to see if the website resizes appropriately. You can also visit a Mobile-Friendly Test website, enter your URL, and study the results to see how your website looks on mobile devices.
2. Examine Your Outbound Links
Links that point to your website (e.g., from Facebook, Quora, or any other website) are called Backlinks. On the other hand, links that point to other websites from your website (e.g., a link to your Facebook page) are called Outbound Links.
If you want to rank on Google’s first page, check your outbound links. Are they all functional and linking to relevant, up-to-date content? If not, change the links and make sure they redirect to meaningful posts to improve your website’s user experience.
Also, if possible, get backlinks from trusted websites such as Quora or any other Website with good content. Backlinks that point to your website from high-quality websites (websites with “high domain authority”) can greatly increase your ranking on Google.
3. Increase User Engagement
The level of user engagement is crucial. After all, while it’s fantastic if you have a lot of traffic, it’s not so great if you have a high bounce rate or don’t get many repeat visits.
Focus on using the right keywords through thorough keyword research to guarantee you’re always responding to the correct search intent of the user (i.e., someone should not come to your site only to realize it is not what they are searching for). Also, make sure your website is filled with valuable and reliable information to keep users interested for longer. This will help you rank higher on Google as it will reduce bounce rate (the number of people coming to your website then leaving immediately).
4. Optimize your Website loading Speed
A slow website with a long loading time can reduce the user experience and negatively impact your Google rankings. There are a few things that you can do to increase loading speed. They include; using images with smaller sizes, reducing the number of redirects in your website, using browser cache (saves some information in the user’s browser so that the page loads faster when the user refreshes). If you use using WordPress, you can easily do this using a plugin.
You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see how fast your pages load.
After you’ve completed the analysis, Google provides several recommendations for boosting page speed.
5. Don’t Use Duplicate Content
Duplicate material on your website, whether it’s a few lines of text or large blocks of content, can result in penalties. For example, you should not use the content in your homepage on another page such as the about or contact page. Google considers this duplicate content. Needless to say, you should not copy content directly from another website. (Either Rephrase it using tools like Qiuilbot or make sure you cite your sources clearly.
Use the Duplicate Page Finder to find duplicate content. Enter the URLs you want to compare, then review the findings and make any necessary adjustments.
6. Provide Great Value
If a visitor stays on your website, Google knows you most likely answered the user’s search query. In other words, you’re making content that’s both useful and informative.
If your articles are valuable and encourage users to stay on your website, you’ll get better page rankings.
7. Don’t Overuse Keywords
Keyword stuffing refers to overusing the same keyword into your content multiple times in order to try and trick Google’s algorithm into ranking your content. This type of content is frequently distracting and difficult to read, and it is penalized by Google. Remember the user experience? Write for humans and Google will know whether you provided value through users’ experiences.
TIP: Include low competition keywords in your H1 and H2 headings. You can use this SEO tool to find out the best keywords for your content.
8. Don’t try to over-optimize things.
SEO is important, but don’t overdo it. Avoid including irrelevant tags or unrelated links in your content.
It can be difficult to strike a balance between effective SEO and over-optimization, but as long as you avoid black hat tactics and aggressive link-building practices, you should be fine.
9. Improve the site’s navigation.
Always put the user’s experience first by:
reorganizing the menus and navigation on the website
constructing a sitemap
ensuring that all of your navigation links are functional
10. Increase the page’s security.
If you haven’t already switched from HTTP to HTTPS, now is the time. HTTPS sites are more secure, so they’re more reliable. From a marketing standpoint, it’s worth the move because Google rewards trustworthy websites with higher rankings.
All you need is simply purchase an SSL certificate or get one for free, install it on your website’s hosting account, and change your URLs to HTTPS instead of HTTP.
Conclusion
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of how Google algorithms works and some of the things that you could change to improve your ranking. However, you should note that the Google algorithm is constantly changing, but if you focus on providing great value and improving your website visitors’ experience, these changes should not have any significant change on your ranking.
Ranking on Google takes time and effort, but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll start seeing results after some time. Focus on creating rich, valuable content for users, fix any broken links, replace low-quality outbound links with new ones, and install an SSL certificate if you don’t already have one
Are you doing Keyword research for your content? Try this Free Keyword Research tool to know what people are searching for and target those keywords in order to rank faster. Try Free