The number one goal that I hear from clients and potential clients is, "I want to rank high on search engines." Obviously, we would need to know a bit more than that in order to achieve that goal (which keywords, define 'high', which pages). However, for the sake of this article, we are going to look at five things you can do to rank high on search engines, no matter how high, what keywords, and which pages:
- Blog - I can't emphasize business blogging enough! If you could only do one thing to rank high on search engines, it's blog. Think about it: every blog post is one more thing for search engines to crawl, one more thing for people to find online, and one more thing that can rank for a keyword. It's the one thing to do to rank high on search engines. Even doing the other three things, and not blogging, won't mean as much as blogging at least twice a week.
- Fix Your Page Titles - The page title is what appears in the tab on the browser whens someone goes to your page or website. It's also the title that appears when your page or website shows up in search engine rankings. Optimizing these with keywords would really make a difference. That means, don't start each page title with your company name or a description. Use two to three keywords per page title, and each page should have it's own unique, two to three keywords.
- Create Additional Pages Where Possible - Business blogging can accomplish this goal, but there are other was to add pages that can rank high on search engines without being spammy. For example, do you have just one page listing all of your products and/or services? If so, then create a page for each product or service. Create a separate page for company news, or create a page of resources for potential customers. All of these options will give you more chances to rank higher on search engines.
- Add Unique Meta Descriptions - Giving each page its own meta description, will help it to rank higher for keywords. Meta descriptions are the sentence or two that describes a search results. it's a great place to put a keyword while telling the search engines (and users) what the page is about. Each page should have its own unique description, not the same one that applies to several pages.
- Commitment - SEO isn't a one-and-done activity. It is something that needs to be revisited and improved upon regularly, whether that's constantly looking at keywords, or continually blogging, or making sure that you still rank for keywords. Those things can easily change, and others can catch up and pull ahead, if you aren't committed to keeping your high search engine rankings after you achieve them.
In order to improve your search engine rankings, you need to figure out what keywords you want to rank for. To do that, you need a keyword strategy. Download our guide to building a keyword strategy to get started and to improve your search engine rankings:
