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Google-friendly blog

When it comes to developing a more Google-friendly website, the Google Webmaster Guidelines are certainly a good place to start because they provide guidelines relating to general design, technicality, and quality. There are several other issues you will want to address, however, and you can benefit by working with a good digital marketing agency.

The internet marketing service Reputation911 reports that fewer than 5 percent of people click on the second page of Google search results, with 91.5 percent of Google traffic coming from first page results. Statista also reports that Google has dominated the search engine market with a 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021.

Here are tips for making sure that your website is as Google-friendly as possible:

Give your website visitors the kinds of information they want

You want to ensure that you have high-quality content on all of your webpages, but especially your homepage. When your pages have information that is useful to your visitors, the content not only attracts visitors but also entices webmasters to link to your website. 

To create a helpful and information-rich website, you will want to write webpages clearly and accurately describing your applicable topic. Keep the words that users would type to find your pages in mind, and then include those words on your website.

Make sure other websites are linking to your website

Links will help Google crawlers find your website and can give it greater visibility in Google search results. When it is returning results for a search, Google will use sophisticated text-matching techniques that display pages which are relevant to every search. 

Google will interpret a link from page 1 to page 2 as being a vote by page 1 for page 2, and votes that are cast by pages that are themselves important will weigh more heavily and help make other pages important. This means that links from websites that are not reputable can cause more harm than benefit.

Google notes that its algorithms are capable of distinguishing natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your website will develop as part of the dynamic nature of the internet when other websites find your content valuable and think it could be helpful for their visitors. 

Unnatural links to your website can be placed there specifically to make your website look more popular to search engines. These kinds of links are covered in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and only natural links will be useful for indexing and ranking your website.

Make your website easily accessible

You want to build your website with a logical link structure. This means that every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Try using a text browser like Lynx to examine your website. Most spiders will see your website much as Lynx would, so a website that features JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash could keep you from seeing your entire website in a text browser, and spiders might have trouble crawling it.

Know what to avoid

You do not want to fill your page with lists of keywords, try to cloak your pages, or put up crawler-only pages. When your website contains pages, links, or text that you do not intend for your visitors to see, Google will consider such links and pages deceptive and could end up ignoring your website.

Do not feel obligated to purchase a search engine optimization service. Certain companies may claim to guarantee a high ranking for your website in Google’s search results. 

Some legitimate consulting firms could improve your website’s flow and content, but others will use deceptive tactics to try and fool search engines. When your domain is affiliated with a deceptive service, the website could be banned from the index.

Do not use images to display important content, names, or links because Google’s crawler does not recognize text contained in graphics. Try to use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page cannot be formatted in regular HTML.

Do not create multiple copies of a single page under different URLs. Many websites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. 

If your website has identical content that can be reached via different URLs, there are many other ways of indicating the canonical or preferred version of a page. A canonical URL refers to the URL of a page that Google thinks is most representative of a set of duplicate pages on your website.

Know your marketing strategy

Your goals will be to know your customer, develop an exceptional brand offer, and effectively communicate with your audience. A search engine can determine if you are found, but your content will determine if a customer will ultimately be interested in working with you.

Good website design alone will not constitute a marketing strategy. You also need to know your audience, who they are, and what type of content they like. 

The more that you know, the easier it will be for you to develop a buyer’s persona and create an effective marketing strategy.

Do your keyword research

Keyword research is an incredibly valuable activity in the search marketing industry because most online purchases begin with a few crucial words that people type into search engines. Your website will have to be optimized for targeted keywords for you to rank higher. 

This is not just a matter of including certain words that could bring people to your website. The actual point will be to get the right type of people to your website, namely the ones who are interested in purchasing your product or service.

The most valuable weapon for keywords is perhaps the Google AdWords Keyword Planner, which is an advertising system Google uses and you can use for free. When you create a list of five to 10 high-quality keywords and phrases related to your website, Google generates a report of the previous 12 months with graphs and search volumes.

Understand your on-page SEO

On-page SEO is basically going to be half of your internet strategy. When you optimize the structure of your page, web crawlers will be able to easily find the keywords you are targeting.

A content management system such as Google Search Central can help you see if your website is being crawled. The parts of your web pages that will need to be optimized include:

  • The body — Include your targeted keywords in the body of your content at least once when posts are short but longer content should increase the number of keywords although you need to beware of keyword stuffing. Google can easily detect keyword stuffing and will penalize your website for this. 
  • SEO toolkits — Look for the relevance of keywords to your website. Try to look past the most obvious keywords related to your services or products. Performing keyword research will be critical to help you identify the phrases that have the most search volume. You will need a reliable SEO toolkit, such as SemRush, Copyscape, SEOCrawler, Screaming Frog, or others.
  • Images — Make sure you are using keywords in alt tags when you use images.
  • Page title — Your page title goes a long way in making sure people want to click.
  • Meta description — A meta description is what people see under a page title when they search for targeted keywords. A solid description gets people to click.
  • H1 title tag — Always include keywords for your blog post or page in the H1 title tag.
  • URL structure — Try to incorporate your keywords into your URL slug and also use the appropriate anchor text for any external links.

Do not ignore off-page SEO

Off-page SEO relates to everything outside of the website that can help improve its ranks. Off-page SEO will be a critical aspect to any effective SEO plan.

Common forms of off-page SEO include:

  • Blogging — Writing blogs can be an inherent part of content marketing and an easy way to get people to come back to your website. You not only provide your users with important information, but you also get to reach higher search ranks.
  • Social media sites — Create accounts on multiple social media platforms. This means you should sign up for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, and other niche-specific social media websites.
  • Link building — A hugely important part of off-page SEO strategy. You want to build internal links on your website and also earn external links on other pages that are similar to yours which could lead back to your website.
  • Guest blog marketing — See if you can communicate with your audience on other blogs serving the same niche as your own. You may not only earn more followers but you can also enhance your brand awareness.

Find Google Design Help in Houston, TX | SERP Matrix

SERP Matrix is a Houston digital marketing agency that handles many of the issues addressed within this post. You can count on us for landing page design and testing.

We also perform search engine submission services. We help clients rank highly in such search engines as Google as well as Alexa, AOL, Ask, Baidu, Bing, Dogpile, DuckDuckGo, Internet Archive, Quora, StartPage, Wolframalpha, Yahoo, and Yandex.

Finally, you can count on SERP Matrix for help with web design and development. We can build, develop, and maintain a custom content management-based website and mobile application which will allow your business to thrive online. 

SERP Matrix invites you to review some of the many different industries we serve. You can call (713) 287-1134 or contact us online for a free consultation that will allow us to better examine your situation and begin explaining how we might be able to help.

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