By now, every website owner has heard one time or the other about how to rank for a particular keyword on search engines. The thing is when you mention search engines, people immediately think Google and that means something. Google is the standard or if I may say, the one who calls the shot when SEO (read as search engine optimization) is concerned.
The Basics Points And Explanations
I still like to believe that there might be people over there that have very little knowledge about search engines and how they have become an indispensible part of our daily life. Let us follow this scenario.
You want to order a Pizza for instance, you don’t know any pizza parlor in your area and you want a nearby one so you don’t have to wait hours before you took delivery. You go online to search on Google and type something like “Pizza delivery near me”. The giant search engine will return a bunch of websites that deliver pizzas in your area. Delivery time is in a couple of minutes. Wow! That is how powerful search engines can be. Now if you are a business owner, is there a way you can make this work for you?
Of course there are ways you can use the power of the search engines to benefit your business and in so doing increase your revenue many folds over and over again. First, how did Google or the search engine you did a search on know what to show you? A good question right? The answer is simply because the owner of the pizza parlor has optimized their website for search engines or they have got somebody to do it for them. It is not by accident that those pages appear on searches. A lot of job has been done to make that happen.
Now that I think that I have explained the basics of using the search engines to search for a particular item, I would like to delve more into certain aspects of what we call SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In further going down the article, I will assume that you know what SEO is at least in the basic form. That being said, let’s get started with what I intended to write about in the first place.
Small Tweaks That Increased Position On Google SERP
I don’t want to confuse you here. SERP only means Search Engine Result Page. That is the page that is displayed when you do a search. Believe me, there are little things you can do on your website to make your site rank for a particular keyword or a set of keywords on Google for instance. I did them and I saw that the methods were effective.
Modification Of Title And Description Of A Page
There was this website that changed its portfolio and gone into a completely different niche. They put up this website but the website was not performing. They approached me with the offer to determine why the site was not even on the first 100 pages on Google. I conducted a keyword analysis to determine which keywords the site was already ranking for.
After that, I modified the title and the description to reflect the targeted key phrase and waited to see whether that was good or not. Two days later, I found out that the page was now in the top 100 page searches on Google. Even though the page was at position number 68, at least that was progress. From a none existent position to position 68, I think it was a success.
Take Away: Modifying your title and description can change the game of ranking because you are telling the search engines what the page is all about through the title and the description.
Category And Tag Links
What I am about to tell you now is an idea I got when I read a blog post on the Yoast website. This is something I have done with my websites that are made with WordPress. I cannot guarantee that this will work on any other platform. You can test it out as I did and maybe you will come to solution.
What I did was going into the category page; we know Word press themes have the possibility to insert text into the category page. That was exactly what I did. I went into the category edit panel, added two paragraphs of text and then from there linked to two posts which I presumed were prominent in that category. I waited 3 days and conducted a new search. The pages I linked to drastically improve in their SERP.
As an SEO consultant working for a Houston company, I like to conduct tests as well s assess situations. One has to conduct tests, do keyword researches and of course monitor or spy on competitors. Find out what your competition is doing and then find a way to go it better.
