Easy way to boost your SERP ranking

10 Jul 2016

Search engines like Google, Bing etc., has fixed factors which they use to rank your website's popularity. The popularity will directly result in where your website will appear for a particular keyword. Few of those well known factors

  1. Periodic fresh content updates in your landing pages or on page where visitor tends to land on
  2. Unique content for your new pages
  3. The content should be focused on particular theme. Example a cooking site should just articles that are related to recipes and cooking methods. This will enable search engines to rank your site based on the targeted content and audience.
  4. Your page keyword should be of proper density. Avoid keyword stuffing.
  5. Promotion of website contents in various related content sites - back link building
  6. Link building from websites that has higher search engine ranking. Checkout Google page rank.
  7. Link your webpages in other websites with proper link text, or text that visitors will find on your page
  8. Ways to bring in new visitors through various marketing channel
  9. Proper SEO tags
  10. Proper popularity transfer during website structure updates
  11. Making sure that search engines can crawl and reach your pages
  12. Make sure your page contents are not hidden onload by mistake for search engines
  13. Serve same content for search engines and actual visitors. Otherwise you might get negative score thinking that your trying to cheat the system.
  14. Avoid serving duplicate content from 2 different domain names. [Redirect with 301 to correct domain name]
    e.g., http://mydomain.com/ is different from http://www.mydomain.com/.
    http://mydomain.com is different from https://mydomain.com.

Above are few things that you can do for your website and sit & wait till you see a positive result. On worst case there can be little or NO change at all.

There are few known factors that have 100% chance of improving your search rankings; These are based on the recommendation from Google & even they have given hint that following will make difference

  1. Improve your website page load times, this will have a direct impact on ranking factor of your website. The main evidence that Google is more in favor of this, is their page speed insights service. 
  2. Enable website security factor by enabling SSL for your website. There are couple of ways to get it for free.
  3. Make your website mobile friendly

How to boost your website load speed ?

  1. Free CDN :
    Content Delivery Network (CDN) will boost your websites load time by caching the static content in multiple data centers, and then serve the visitors from the nearest center. This will reduce the network latency.

    For example, Your servers may be in United States and your targeted audiences might be from India. In this case, serving the content from USA to India would incur more network related latencies. Whereas if there are many datacenter near to the visitor, then the content will be served twice as fast as the normal one.

    Browsers normally makes just 6 simultaneous request to a domain, having a CDN will allow browser to request / make multiple simultaneous request. There by reducing the time required download and to start the render.

    CDN reduces the actual load on your application server by redirecting all the static file requests to its high speed servers.

    There are few free CDN service available, that you can use for your personal websites. One of the most notable one is CloudFlare, which provides free CDN. You can read more at Cloudflare CDN

    Test your website performance score using this tool provided by Google -> Page speed Insights
  2. Improve security :
    Having an SSL connection between the client machine (visitor) and your server, will increase the sense of safety & build trust between you and your customers. Well Google has taken a step to promote this by giving a small incentive points in its ranking algorithm. Secure sites are given more preference compared to the other ones that may have similar or equal content quality. So it is wise to enable SSL for your website.

    Well for starters or for personal websites you can use Cloudflare's free SSL while enabling the CDN (looks more like a 1+ 1 free offer).
     
  3. Mobile Friendly:
    Recently Google announced that mobile friendly websites would rank better in the mobile search results. With more visitors browsing from the mobile devices, this has become an ultimate requirement to make your site mobile responsive (Not just mobile compatible). For this you need to provide proper viewport width and make your site elements to wrap properly for smaller screens. This would improve your website search rankings on mobile/tablet devices.

    You can test your website's mobile friendliness using this this tool provided by Google -> Google webmasters - mobile friendliness test