How do I get my website on Google?

How do I get my website on Google

In reality there are no tricks or easy ways to get your website to rank well in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

However, while search engines do not reveal the precise algorithms used to determine search results, they are more than happy to provide recommendations and guidance on how best influence ranking factors.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of resources dedicated to SEO and how to get the most of your optimisation practices.

At Leading Hand, we have developed our top ten SEO principles to consider when optimising a website to appear on Google and other search engines:

  1. Content (on-site). Regularly create a variety of original and relevant content on your website including blog posts, articles and video.
  2. Technical. Another on-site SEO practice and one which involves making sure your website and it’s code are structured correctly, metadata (e.g. titles, descriptions and alt data) is well written and up-to-date, no page errors exist and a site-map is present. These are important as they provide important information to search engines on how to index your site, if at all, and display it in search results.
  3. Citations. Ensure your business is listed and up-to-date in all of the relevant online business directories. These provide a great signal of the strength of your business and brand to search engines.
  4. Local Search. Search engines will display maps and local information when a user signals local intent with their search behaviour. Claim, update and verify your Google My Business listing and ensure that your website contains information relevant to your locality.
  5. Mobile. Optimising your website for mobile devices is critical if you want search engines and users to find it. It’s not enough just to have a responsive website however – a good user experience (UX) is an important ranking factor and as a general rule, your website’s design should provide user friendly functionality and fast page load times, particularly on mobile.
  6. Backlinks. These are links, or “referrals” to your website from other domains and are treated like a vote for the popularity of your site. A great backlink strategy includes generating lots of links from quality websites that are relevant to yours. Be careful though – links from poor quality and low relevance websites (e.g. link farms) can have the opposite effect.
  7. Reviews. A potential customer will use your reviews to make a decision on whether to do business with you, so why wouldn’t Google? Search engines are predicted to give more and more weighting to reviews as time goes on. What do your reviews say about your business?
  8. Social. Social media signals are now widely considered to play a part in search engine rankings. If you are not active across the key social channels, it’s worth considering for SEO as well as branding and communication.
  9. Monitor. Regularly monitoring and reporting on your website’s analytics data is essential. Google Analytics is a fantastic tool and provides plenty of actionable metrics and insights for your website. Read it, understand it and act on it.
  10. Plan. Develop and implement a practical and achievable SEO strategy for your website. Even the best designed websites will benefit from an effective strategy and those that don’t will get left behind (or worse still end up on page 2).