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How to get on top of google search results

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Everyone out there wants to be on top of google search results. You don’t need to be desperate and try way too hard to achieve quality search traffic. This is something which no one can guarantee, but to get a search engine visibility and relevant traffic you need to keep it simple and adhere to google’s quality guidelines. I am listing below few tips which I think will help any website get on top of google search results.

  • Always keep in mind google’s primary purpose
  • Produce high quality content helpful to users
  • Make sure search engines can read your web page
  • Adhere to google’s quality guidelines for webmasters
  • Go Social and share

High Quality Content is equal to better ranking and more search traffic

Always keep in mind the google’s primary purpose

Google is the best search engine used by 80% of users searching for something over the internet. Google happens to be the favorite search engine as it provides the best search results for the query a user makes, in the minimum timeframe. To retain its reputation and business google needs to keep doing this. Which means google’s primary purpose is to provide the best search results for what a user is looking for and as fast as possible.  Any website looking to get on top of search results need to keep this in mind while building the website and content.

Produce high quality content helpful to users

SEO is no more about the density of the keywords on a page or a website. It’s no longer about the page titles and meta tags. Search engines have evolved and are smart enough to differentiate between low quality seo optimized content and a high quality content which can be more useful to a user. While building content you need to keep in mind the google’s primary purpose and build the content for the user and not exactly for the search engines. Google will always make changes to it’s algorithm to protect users from low quality content.  Ask yourself “Will I find this content useful and interesting, if I would be the user reading this?”. If your answer is YES, you are on the right track.

Make sure you provide the answers for the users as early as possible on the article or blog. Internet users are impatient and they do not read the full content. They have a tendency to scan the page to find their answers. There is a “F” rule which applies on how internet users scan pages. So it’s a good idea to put the conclusion of the blog or article on top left to gain user attention.  Make sure you build the content in a way that the user has to spend minimum effort to find his answers or the key points of article. Use headings, sub headings and bulleted lists to highlight key points.

Make sure that search engines can read your page

If you build a great content and search engines can’t read (crawl), there is no use and you will not get search engine visibility. Make sure your webpage is not blocked by robots.txt or Meta nofollow on head section of your page. There could be many reasons on why google can’t crawl your website. Do signup to google webmaster tools. This will provide you the details if google cannot crawl your website or a particular page. It’s a good idea to enable email forwarding on google webmaster tools, where google sends you an email for any important issues on your website.

You can signup to google webmaster tools with a gmail id here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

You can read here to find out on how to enable email forwarding in google webmaster tools:  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/140528?hl=en

Adhere to google’s quality guidelines for webmasters

Makes sure your website and the webpages adhere to google’s quality guidelines for webmasters. There are a lot of points which cannot be covered here, I’m listing a few of the key things to be followed.

  • Have clear hierarchy of navigation, keep text links and not images or flash.
  • Think about what users would search or have questions which would type on search engines. Include those text in your webpages
  • Have descriptive <title> and ALT for images
  • Use a text based browser to see if your content if visible properly as search engines can only read text
  • Make use of robots.txt file. You can tell search engines which file or folder to crawl and which ones to avoid.
  • Make sure your website loads fast. This improves users satisfaction and this is important for google’s primary purpose to provide users best  search results in as fast as possible.
  • Build content for user and not search engines.
  • Avoid cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages and scraped content.

See a video here on best practices to help google find your website and index it. The following link also contains the complete google quality guidelines for webmasters: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Go Social and Share

It’s the age of penguin and no longer the old fashioned link exchanges work. Google is going hard on artificial links. You need to build links naturally or prove by other means that your content is really unique and interesting to users. Social media is a great way to build links and to reach maximum users. Use various social media like twitter, facebook and linkedin to share your web page, blog or article. If you have built a really good content which is interesting and helpful, it would be shared naturally by users on social media. This in return gets you visitors and search engines understand that the content must be good, that is why it’s shared over the internet and attracting visitors. This builds your backlinks as well as trust over your content.

It’s difficult to cover in one article all tips to get top search ranking and quality traffic. But if followed properly the above listed points will definitely help you rank better on search results. Digital and search marketing is vast and there are many more best practices which needs to be followed for better results. Feel free comment and add on your points which might help in getting to top of search rankings.

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