Developing a Google Search-friendly website
Are you having trouble driving targeted traffic to your blog or company website? If so, it might be time to take a long, hard look at your website and your online marketing efforts. There are ways to improve your Google rankings for the long-term, but you need to know what you’re doing in order to avoid making common mistakes that will hurt you rather than help you.
Take a look at these four tips for creating a Google-friendly website.
- Publish Amazing Content
Content is king. It always has been, and it always will be. People come to your website for the content, so make sure that you only post relevant, high-quality content that answers visitors’ questions, solves their problems, entertains them and makes them want to come back for more.
The days of throwing up cheap content on the wall and hoping it sticks are gone forever. If you’re still trying to publish mountains of cheap, over-optimized content to please search engines, you’re not going to be successful in the long run. So focus on creating great content that people will love.
- Network With Influencers In Your Industry
If content is still king, then links are still queen. Google has stated repeatedly that it counts links from other websites as votes in favor of your own. But Google as become very good at spotting inorganic links – links placed on other sites in a self-serving fashion – as opposed to genuine, organic links that have been earned with quality content.
If you’re putting out amazing content, then you’re going to get real links from real people. But you still need to get out there and network with other site owners in your niche and earn some links from them. So consider a guest posting campaign that offers quality, original content to other sites.
Great content without relevant links from authoritative sources is just not enough.
- Optimize Internal Linking Structure
Besides favoring websites that offer great content and incoming links, Google also wants to send searchers to websites that offer a great user experience. And the best place to start is with website navigation that makes sense.
If newcomers to your website are having a hard time finding the information they’re looking for, then you’re going to lose them, and Google can see when people click away from your site and back to the search results quickly. So make sure that your homepage – and every page on your site, really – offers links that drive readers deeper into your site in a well-organized fashion.
- Only Hire Reputable Web Development Firms
We also have to talk about hiring web development professionals to help you build out your website and drive traffic to it. There are many web marketing companies out there who will absolutely destroy your website’s reputation with search engines. They promise fast, easy results – and they deliver! They do this by using shady search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that temporarily trick Google’s algorithm into ranking your site quickly in its search results. But then Google figures out what’s going on – usually within a few months – and then your website gets slapped with a penalty, and you end up worse off than where you started.
It is essential that any web development experts you hire only use Google-friendly or “white hat” methods to improve your website’s search ranking. If they’re using manual linkbuilding, keyword stuffing, content spinners, email spam and social media bots, then that is eventually going to come back to you in a bad way.
So don’t just hire the cheapest new firm on the block. Instead, take a little time to seek out a reputable company with long-term clients. Any two-bit SEO can get you results in six months using black hat methods, but only SEO firms who use truly Google-friendly strategies will be able to maintain long-term clients.
