How To Make Your Site More Visible on Google?

In the virtual world, among everything in an online business, generating more and more traffic from search engine is considered one of an essential thing. Search engines allow website to bring targeted traffic to the pages. These type of traffic is actually more responsive as compared to any other marketing tactics and thus, help businesses to turn their visitors into their customers. That's why most of the companies irrespective of their size are trying to achieve the highest ranking among search engine result pages (SERP). Because those sites that have managed to appear on the top has the advantage of being avail be their potential customers instead of their competitors.

Since every business nowadays has their own website, it becomes much difficult for them to achieve the top position on search result. Webmasters adopt a unique pattern to improve the visibility of their site and that process is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which helps the website to stand out of the competition uniquely.

If implemented properly, SEO allows the site to achieve the top position on the search engine which eventually grab the attention of many visitors to get more clicks.

Most of the businesses understand the value of high visibility and mark it as an essential part of their marketing campaigns. In fact, those businesses that do not have the skilled team of SEO also consider to hire an SEO agency which can enhance the ranking of their site. SEO practices are much easy to learn and implemented that even a small business can also think to do all by themselves. 

If your company does not have enough budget to invest in SEO services, this blog is very useful for you. In this blog, you will discover few of the most useful practices which could help your website to grab the attention of many people and improve the traffic on your site.

Let's have a look: 

Strategy #1. Target the right keyword

An essential step to be taken to boost the online visibility is to know the words or phrases that your target customers use to search for the products or services on the web. 

Make sure to use the keyword practices in a right way. Of course, no one wants to make their website in such a way that use to describe the athletic footwear as rubber sandals when your target audience is continuously searching for the sneakers. Also, you would not like it when someone calls your company as web development studio, especially when your target audience is looking by typing the web development agencies on the web.

You can also determine that whether you are using the best phrases or words for your web pages or not using various online tools, such as Google Keyword Planner. This tool allows you to know how many searches any specific word or phrase has generated including the region from where the traffic has generated. In fact, keyword planner also provides you with the list of keywords that you can use to optimize your search results. 

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In addition with this, there are many paid tools available which allow you to use keywords to attract more clicks, such as SEMrush and word stream. 

 Strategy #2. Look at your robots.txt files

Robots.txt files are the small document that exists on a website to allow the search engines to know which web page they can crawl. Check how the file has been written and follow the best practices so that your site can enhance the visibility among the top search results. 

You can check the robots.txt file simply by going to www.example.com/robotss.txt. 

See the example above, the example.com is the domain of your site and you will see the result as:

 The first thing that you must consider is whether your file is preventing the web bots to access your site or not. Though this might sound little awkward, this usually happens when the development team passes it on to redesign it and later they forgot to eliminate the line which usually restricts the entry of those web spiders that limits the access of your website. This usually looks like this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Since you want spiders to crawl your website, there are still some exceptions, such as:

• Admin pages: Admin pages must be accessible only to the relevant staff and to the owner of the website. Don't make it searchable by the general public.

• Checkout web pages: these pages are meant for the people who are completing the last step of their purchase from the e-commerce site. The information available on this page is unique and should not be shared with the rest of the world.

• Staging area page: these pages allows you to either build or test web pages or even a separate section of your site. Don't allow them to be indexed by the search engine because they aren't prepared properly yet.

• Dynamic pages: these pages can be recognized easily by some characters like “=” or “?” in the URL. This implies that the web page is the unique one in a specific session and is of no use for other users. Do remember to include a Disallow:? so that it cannot be indexed by the search engine.

Strategy #3. Set up Google Search Console

The easiest way to optimize your website is to see how it will be appeared by Google. Luckily, Google provides some of the data it has regarding your website through a great platform, known as Search Console. This is a tool provided by the Google, that allows you to claim the ownership of the site in the mind of Google. This provides you access to some of the special report and functionalities that you won't be able to see anywhere else. 

You can get many of the SEO related data, such as:

• Status regarding the index

• Errors that might occur while crawling

• Duplicate content

• Inbound links

• Data status

• Notifications on any issue.

This also allows you to make use of various tools such as submitting the sitemaps, eliminating pages from being indexed disavow links and so on. Search console helps a lot in informing you about various SEO principles.  

Strategy #4. Using and optimizing XML sitemaps

Though XML sitemaps are not compulsory these are the most essential factor of SEO campaign. This represents all the pages that are facing by the public and details that when it has gone live, how many times it has been updated and where does it place in your information architecture. This also allows search engines to locate your site and crawl the web pages easily and efficiently.

The best thing is, you don't have to learn specifically about how you can write XML files on your site. There are many platforms which can generate the sitemaps automatically by using various plugins, such as  WordPress. To generate the file, you simply have to install and configure that plugin and check it in your browser. 

However, you also find the sitemap by typing www.example.com/sitemap.xml. If it didn't work then also it will tell you how you can search for the sitemap because it differs on how your plugin works. It will appear like this:

Basically, this was generated by the Yoast SEO plugin. There are other options also available rather than using the WordPress platform, which gives it more code look. 

Undoubtedly, having a sitemap is a great thing, it is of course, not all there which uses the maximum its power of SEO. you have to ensure that the search engines are being aware of the sitemap, simply by submitting it to the diagnostic service of the site. To make this thing, you need to set up Google Search Console account. After setting it up, you can go to crawl and then the XML Sitemaps.  After that, you have to click on the Add/Test button on the top. After few days, you will be able to see some data like:

This will give you an insight about how many pages has been indexed in the search engine. Those pages which are not listed in the Search Engine Result Pages, you will have have to review them. Because sometimes, duplicate content, low-quality content or some technical issue could also include non-inclusion. 

Strategy #5. Optimize the speed of your site

From past few years, how early your website loads also affect the ranking of your site among search engines. Those sites which are focusing on your niche can make all the difference through speed. Luckily, Google allows you to check the speed of your site by using tools so that you can take necessary steps to improve the speed. You simply have to go to the PageSpeed Insight of the tool of Google and just type the URL of the site that you want to check., such as:

This will analyze your page. It will score your site from 0 to 100. Getting 85 is considered as an ideal mark. The best part of using this tool is, it will recommend you what you can do to fix up the speed of your site.  

Strategy #6. Ensure a mobile friendly site 

In  the year 2005, the query coming from mobile device overtook the number of queries that are coming from desktop devices. Since then Google has shifted to index those sites first that offer mobile friendliness. And more than that, Google has officially announces that now it ranks site according to the mobile versions. 

Mobile friendly websites allow users to go through the website on the smaller screen with same readability and design integrity as well. The main thing that needs to be considered to ensure the mobile friendliness is to determine that user should be able to read the entire content, images or any other on-screen object on the site with the need of zooming it. 

Google also provide various tools which can help you by testing your the mobile friendliness of your site, such as the Mobile friendly testing tool. This tool is quite similar with that of the site speed testing tool. In this tool also you have to enter the URL of your site and it will tell you the result.

This will provide you a message along with the screenshot of your site. If your site is not much mobile friendly, then you actually need to discuss it with your designer and development team to enhance the friendliness of your site. This will represent you the result according to the preferences of your target audience. For instance, if your site is B2B then you don't have to concern much about the traffic on your site and therefore, this will be set Lastly on your priority list. However, if you are running an ecommerce site, blog or even affiliate site can benefit from this tool.

Well nowadays, most of the WordPress themes are designed by already keeping the mobile friendliness design in mind and make it a big point to generate more traffic. 

Strategy #7. Make your site secure

Few years before, Google has made an official announcement that including HTTPS on your site will provide you an additional point to achieve the higher ranking. Data integrity is one of the main factors to reward this protocol. The more secure the site is the better user experience it is likely to deliver to its customers. The user is also more likely to share their information to the secure website and sign in on that site that include HTTPs instead of HTTP.

If you are already an owner of a site which includes HTTP, it’s the time to shift to HTTPs. Though it needs some efforts to be made then you will be able to gain better visibility and also users will feel more confident and safe in sharing their personal information with you.  

Strategy #8. Optimize all the On-Page Elements

Most of the businesses take help from professional SEO expert to make on-page elements effective. Though, it is not really tough to learn about the on-page factors that could affect the ranking of your site and the best strategies to make on-page SEO elements. Check out the things you need to pay extra attention to these points to rank your page better: 

• URL slugs- These are the extensions that found on the root domain, whenever you jump to any other subpage. The structure URL usually changes like this: example.com/product-page

Search engines usually look at the slugs to get an idea what that web page is offering. Therefore it is crucial to creating your URL in real words instead of using any special symbol or alphanumeric string. Make it short but include the necessary words which give the insight to search engines about the page.

• Title tags- title tags are one of the essential on-page ranking factors which provide the search engine for determining the relevance of a content of a page. The few words of character string allow spiders and users to know regarding what the page is all about in a concise manner. The title tag of the page can be seen on the page source. Check out the best practices to ensure that the title boosts the visibility of your web page by search engine:

  • Don't include more than 60 characters string (Including space)

  • Include the target keywords in title

  • Include keywords in the starting of the title

  • In the end of the title, consider mentioning your brand name

  • Use only one or two keywords, don't stuff it more.

• Meta Description- Meta description of a web page can include only 160 words string of text which will appear inside the when the user will search for the services. This allows user to know whether the content includes all those things that they are expecting from the content. Though, this does not affect the ranking of the page but appeal more click-through rate.

Meta description provides the user with a reason to click on it. You can write an effective meta description as:

• Don't include more than 160 words character.

• Be precise

• Include keywords in meta description for at least once

• Add a call to action in the end.

The better meta description you write the more clicks you will get and the more clicks, the better ranking you will achieve.

• Headline text- headline text holds much value than other SEO factors because heading gives the users an insight that what the web page is all about. Make sure to mark these lines with special HTML tags, like H1, H2, H3 and so on.

Follow the below guidelines to write the effective headline:

• Be precise and make it short

• Make it engaging so that users click on it

• Include target keyword at least once

• Make sure to include the text formating by assigning H1 on that page.

• Image ALT tag- search engine has come a long way on how they read and interpret information available on the web pages. Google has considered as the best search engine because it knows how to assign meaning and which result to show to the users to specific word or phrase. However, Google is still lacking in interpreting the meaning and that is in recognizing the images. Web spiders still rely on the text available with the images to know what the image is about. Webmasters use HTML tags to indicate the users and web crawlers that what's being shown in the picture. You might have noticed the situation that whenever you hover the mouse over an image it shows some text written on it. This is what exactly Image ALT tag is. While assigning the image ALT tag to the image, make sure to implement the best practices to optimize your image, such as:

  • Keep it simple and to the point

  • Include the main keyword in the image for at least one

  • Don't include more than 60 characters string

  • Don't stuff the keywords, instead write some relevant text also. 

Strategy #9. Make use of local search

From past few years, Google is much likely to show the result to the users about the services that are around them. If your business is targeting any specific city or state, do no avoid to leverage the local SEO services. Google has now looked more to provide its user with the conventional result along with location-specific results. 

You can consider focusing on the following area to make your business appear on the local searches:

• Claim Google My Business but remember to input the correct address and ask people to leave some reviews. Also, add images.

• Make sure to have consistency in displaying NAP (Name, Address, and Phone number) on the web.

• Add Schema.org markup whenever you monitor the NAP on your site.  

Strategy #10 Do remember to include links

Pagerank algorithm has been the most revolutionary updates in the history of Google update. Named after the Google co-founder Larry page, this update changed the norms for websites getting better rank in SERPs. After this update, websites were ranked and considered authentic by a number of qualified links obtained. It means, the better is the power for attracting links, the more ranking will get improved on SERPs.

There can be many white hat technique for gaining backlinks for your website. Some of these are:

• Build a large and comprehensive library

• Get your sites reviewed by bloggers

• Get interview from industry publications

• Do guest blogging on other sites

• Share your experience as an influencer

• Conduct different contest

• Give sale

Link building may be too labor expensive yet the results obtained are worth of the effort. Firms that specializes in SEO can be a better option to consult while planning to start your link building process.

Final words

We agree that SEO is the vast arena to look at, yet applying basic fundamentals in your marketing efforts can make you earn better results.