Website SEO Checklist: 10 Steps to Better Google Rankings You have a great website and wish it appeared at the top of Google’s ranking anytime people searched for keywords related to it. This article will cover steps to increase your website’s google ranking with our SEO checklist. 1. Understand how Google ranks pages Google is constantly changing their algorithm they use to rank pages. Most often these changes are not announced, thus you have to make a conscious effort to understand how the current algorithm behaves. You can never know exactly how it works, but you can identify some patterns that you can use for your benefit. 2. Make your pages available for index Never forget to use the index status report to understand how google sees the pages on your site. Ensure that no page is being blocked by mistake. Have a robots.txt file that determines which pages you want to be crawled or not. 3. Get a certificate of security Google announced that it favored websites that had HTTPS encryption over those that didn’t have it. This is to ensure that users are not mistakenly led to websites that may be harmful to them in anyway. So securing your website with an SSL will definitely influence its ranking on Google. 4. Be intentional with Back Links These are links from a website that lead to a page on another website. Most algorithms consider these as votes for a page, thus having a high number of them influences the ranking of that page. Many search engines employ this strategy, including Google. 5. Have a fast site Nobody likes a slow-loading websites, and people might leave a website that takes too long to load. This affects the popularity of your site which has a direct influence on the site’s ranking on Google. Try to speed up your site; reduce image file sizes, speed up your JavaScript, use faster plugins, remove redirect chains, etc. Make it your goal to get your website pages to load within 3 seconds. 6. Reduce Redundancy Google rankings are affected when the same content is put up on different links on your website. There is always a primary one that gets diluted by the duplicates, and this is the page you should let your canonical tag point to. 7. Take Keywords Seriously Keywords describe the words people are using to find you. The content you post determines the kind of traffic you get, which in turn influences your ranking. Know your audience, know how they describe the niche you want to be in, and take advantage of those descriptions to improve your ranking. 8. Take Out Low Value Pages Some pages are created to make sure the website meets certain industry standards and not to inform your audience. e.g. License agreement page. It is better to remove these pages from your index, leaving only content rich pages. The more relevant your pages are, the higher your Google ranking. 9. Make Every Link useful Google rankings are affected by your website’s internal link structure. So having a descriptive anchor text is advantageous to your page. You just need to ensure that your links contain the same keywords as the pages they take visitors to. 10.Make Your Site Mobile Friendly In the mobile age, it is necessary that your website has responsive design and provides the best experience regardless the visitor’s screen size. With the priority Google gives to mobile searches, you can’t afford to ignore them in your approach to indexing. There are ways you can combine these tips to give you the optimum ranking technique. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you ever need some guidance. We are always available to help you take thesteps to achieving better google rankings. For more info: https://beniceandlead.com/
