7 Steps To Boost Your Organic Rankings

You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on AdWords ads to display your website at the top of Google’s search results. While pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is always an option, a more cost-effective solution is search engine optimization (SEO). By optimizing your website, you’ll encourage higher organic rankings, which means more free traffic.

#1) Add Website to Google Search Console

The first step to improving your organic rankings is to add your website to Google Search Console. This free tool offered by Google provides insight into how your website performs in Google’s search results. Formerly known as Webmaster Tools, you can use Search Console to track the keywords and placements for which your website ranks. You can even run reports for a specific time period, allowing you to see whether your website’s rankings increased or lowered.

#2) Adopt a Mobile-Friendly Design

Even if your website ranks high in the desktop search results, it may rank lower for the same keyword in mobile results. This is because search engines, including Google and Bing, display different results for mobile users. And if your website fails to offer a positive experience for mobile users, you’ll struggle to increase your organic rankings. You can see if your website’s design is mobile friendly by using the Mobile-Friendly Test. If it fails, consider adopting a responsive design that automatically changes depending on the device on which it’s viewed.

Responsive websites are designed using a combination of HTML and CSS3 with proportion-based units of measurements. This is in stark contrast to traditional web design frameworks, which use fixed units of measurements. With proportional-based units of measurement, such as percentage, responsive websites adapt to create a positive experience for desktop and mobile visitors alike.

#3) Prevent Duplicate Content

Duplicate content — content that’s published on multiple pages — may hinder your SEO efforts. If you publish the same article on two or more pages, how will search engines know which page to index? Google’s indexing and ranking algorithm have improved over the years, lessening the threat of duplicate content. The search engine powerhouse typically indexes the first page on which a piece of content was published, omitting the other pages from its search results. However, it’s still a good idea to prevent duplicate content on your website. You can block Google from crawling pages with duplicate content by modifying your website’s htaccess and robots.txt file. Alternatively, you can set use canonical URLs to guide search engines to the original source of the content.

#4) Optimize Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Even with all the changes Google has made to its algorithm over the years, page titles and meta descriptions are two of the most important ranking signals. When you create a new web page, you’ll need add the title tag and meta description to the HTML. This information won’t be displayed on your website, however. Rather, search engines use title tags and meta descriptions to form listings used in their search results.

Here are some best practices to follow when creating page titles and meta descriptions:

• Limit your title tags to 60 characters.
• Limit your meta descriptions to 300 characters.
• Include your web page’s target keyword in both the title tag and meta description.
• Avoid unnecessary filler in both of these elements.

#5) Ask Visitors to Leave a Comment

Whether you run an e-commerce store, a blog or any other website, you should allow visitors to leave comments. Granted, you’ll have to spend time filtering spam comments from legitimate comments, but it’s well worth it.

Visitor comments encourage higher organic rankings in the following ways:

• They show search engines that the web page is constantly being updated.
• They improve the value of your content to other visitors.
• They encourage higher user engagement, which search engines use as a ranking signal.
• They provide additional, unique content for your web page.

#6) Focus on Content

The secret to a successful SEO strategy is high-quality content. Without content or with low-quality content, visitors will probably leave immediately after loading your website. When this occurs, search engines will take notice, believing that your website is irrelevant and offers little or no value to its audience.

To encourage higher rankings, plan a content marketing strategy for your website that involves publishing high-quality content on a regular basis. Don’t just publish a poorly written article that consists strictly of your target keywords. A smarter approach is to create content that’s tailored for your audience. If your website is about financing, perhaps you can post articles relating to saving money, choosing a mortgage and improving a person’s credit score. These topics are all relevant to a financial website’s audience.

Of course, you’ll still need to optimize your content so that it ranks well in the search results. Adding images and including the appropriate alt text for those images can help. You can also optimize your content by structuring it with headings and subheadings.

#7) Build Backlinks

After performing all the necessary on-page SEO for your website, you should begin building backlinks. Each backlink pointing to your website is a symbol of trust and authority. If your website has hundreds or thousands of backlinks from relevant sources, search engines will view your website as being worthy of a top search ranking.

Here are some tips to build high-quality backlinks that search engines love:

• Don’t purchase backlinks or engage in other black-hat link-building schemes.
• Create a backlink for your website on your Facebook and Twitter profiles.
• Use your target keywords as the anchor text for your backlinks, but don’t overdo it.
• Try to avoid building too backlinks that contain the nofollow HTML attribute.
• Build backlinks on websites that are relevant to your website.
• Use inbound techniques, such as content marketing, to encourage backlinks naturally.
• Target websites with a high Domain Authority (DA).
• Build backlinks slowly to reduce the risk of a rankings penalty.

Don’t let low search rankings prevent your website from gaining traction in its niche. Follow these seven steps to boost your rankings and reap the benefits of more traffic.