How to Get Top Ranking for Your Website in Google

SEO short for Search Engine Optimization has been the best marketing tactic to grow your online business. SEO is done to increase a website’s ranking in search engines, especially Google, and when you rank your website well on the search for popular terms, called “keywords”, your business improves.

If we talk about SEO 10-12 years ago, the story was completely different as a normal website with a huge number of backlinks used to get ranked easily in Google and other search engines. But, as Google noticed that this way users were getting irrelevant results as well because even if you had a good website and if you don’t have done SEO, your site stayed low on Google and those who did SEO, ranked well no matter if their site was adding value much or not.

This is the reason; Google started to look into the issue so that they can show the best results to the users to improve their experience while searching for something on Google. This made a lot of changes in Google’s core search algorithm, and in the last past 10 years, you must have witnessed a lot of things happening in SEO such as Google Panda (rewards good quality content, and lower the ranking of low-quality content), Google Penguin(fight with link spam), etc.

Google started to give value to the websites with good content, good loading speed, have natural contextual links from good authority websites, and so on. This way, you have to make your website good from all aspect to make it rank well.

Some say, SEO is dead, but no, SEO is not dead, and I think it never will be. But, the way SEO should be done has been changed a lot. There are a lot of things that worked in the past, do work now but there many news things you must do in a whole new way.

Based on that, below are a few pointers to get top ranking for your website in Google.

Best Ways to Rank Higher on Google

1. Killer Content

Killer content doesn’t mean just writing a long article, but it means a lot more. An article that clears everything about the topic in a much descriptive way, along with examples, references, images, and videos, can be termed as Killer content.

I would not tell you to write a long content rather would advise you to write something that solves every question in the mind of the reader. You must be sure to offer a lot more in your content that is what some people say a “Meaty Content” that means you add some extra value by including some related useful stuff and relate with the topic you are writing.

Brian’s On Page SEO article is the true example of killer content, and in fact, much more than that, and that is the reason this article ranks very high on Google. There are many examples like this you can check out.

Apart from adding information and other stuff in the content, you must optimize it well for search engines. After all, content is king as long as SEO and user experience are concerned.

How to Optimize Content?

• Content-Length: The days when you used to rank quickly with small articles seems to be gone because most of your competitors would be creating long articles. So, you have to analyze and then write an article. First of all, find out the top 5-6 results on Google that are ranking for the keyword you are targeting. Now, check their contents and find out what are their lengths. Based on that, you create content and make sure you do better than all those sites both in terms of content length and information. Below is a chart that shows the average conteng length for top 10 results on Google SERPs.

It makes much clear that writing longer content actually helps you rank better but just having long articles is not enough, the content must have good information and engaging material as well.

• Error Free, Plagiarism Free: Make sure your content is grammatically correct, and there is no plagiarism at all. Even if your article passes Copyscape, Grammarly’s Plagiarism checker, or any other similar tools, make sure to check manually and be sure that your content doesn’t look aggregated as well.
• Include Main Keywords and LSI Keywords: Users find your website on Google by searching for some words or phrase which are known as Keywords. Thus, you must make sure to have included the main keywords throughout the content, along with LSI keywords (Long phrase related keywords). LSI keywords help Google to better understand as what your page is about, and same helps users too. For example, if you use a keyword “Apple price” it may confuse between the fruit and the Apple Company. So, a long phrase keyword “Apple iPhone prices” will be better to include wherever possible. Such clarity helps your content to get ranked well with targeted keywords. Sometimes, when you are targeting to rank within a smaller geographical area, adding the area name to form better LSI keywords, and using those helps a lot. For example, if an SEO company is situated in Sydney, and wants to rank well in that area adding keywords like SEO Sydney, best SEO companies in Sydney, and so on would surely going to help.
• Make Use of Interlinking: Interlinking your content doesn’t only help search engines to crawl your site better, but it helps users as well to find related stuff while reading.

• Link out to Good sources: When you write content, don’t shy to link out to good contents as references wherever needed.

These are some of the things you should care about while creating the content. Moreover, if you would like to know more what type of contents Google rank better, you should check out the article on Quicksprout, which has something for you to learn.

2. Make Your Websites Load Quickly

Google has been encouraging webmasters to speed up the websites’ loading speed because a better loading website can give good user experience. If there is better user experience, your site will be more likely to rank because Google loves the websites that offer a better user experience.

For making your website load quickly, use the best web hosting service. Preferably go with VPS or Dedicated web hosting. Use lightweight images, and make use of clean coding. There are many things that you can do to increase the load time.

3. Make Your Website Mobile Responsive

The world we live in is the world of Smartphones. Studies say that traffic from smartphones has been increasing steadily on websites. That is the reason, having a mobile responsive website is the need of the hour. If your site doesn’t display well on smartphones or tablets, you will lose a lot of users as they might close it if not opened properly.

If you are yet to make your website mobile responsive, do this today! You can either ask your developer to do it or if you do work on your website yourself, you should read some good guides to learn to make websites responsive. I have got one article on Dzone that is quite informative for the same. You can check that out.

4. Build Quality Backlinks

No matter how far Google has come by upgrading its search algorithm, links are still valuable, and if you have great backlinks to your website, the probability of your website to rank on top pages becomes very high.

Remember that the way link building had been done in the past, may not work well in the current scenario as things have been changed.

You need to know the best ways to build links that help you to rank better. Though there are many ways, contextual links work the best nowadays.

Read the above-suggested articles, and I am sure you will have a good knowledge of link building.

Moreover, I would like to give you a suggestion that create the content that others would like to link to. Yes, it works. When you have very well written meaty content, other publishers or site owners love to link to your content as reference. Also, go slow while building links. Never build a lot of links in a short span of time. Maintain the link velocity, and keep building links gradually.

5. RankBrain

RankBrain is a Google’s search algorithm which uses AI, and it looks for the relationships and connections between words and phrases.

Thus, being a human, you can give the information accordingly that RankBrain could understand your content the way you want it should understand. This way, you can get good ranking for many long tail keywords.

Conclusion

SEO has been evolving in different ways, and in fact, better ways which stop the spam, and better sites get priority. Thus, the better the site you build, the better ranking you get. Moreover, content is the most important thing consider as you read in the article. Thus, invest more time and money on the content to get top rankings.

I hope this article gives you a lot of ways to try out, and see if they work for you too. You can only try because the same strategies that worked for me may or may not work for you too. Thus, checking out the best strategies and test them out.