Organic SEO: Optimise your Website for free! (3rdPart)
This is the 3rd and last article of my series on organic SEO. You can find part one about key descriptions and Google’s ranking algorithm here. And part two on keywords and the HTML structure here. In this article I would like to close this topic with all other indicators which are also important for your ranking on Google’s search results. Unfortunately there is no general topic to categorize them, it’s more or less a little bit of everything! These indicators are NOT less important than the others though.
Google Maps:
I would highly recommend to place your business in Google Maps. Through that you can appear in the Google Maps listing on the first page of the search results, even if your website isn’t that well optimized to be on the first page under normal conditions.
Content:
Still king! If your content is of high quality, customers or other webmasters will probably use your content as a reference. And you will get more sites pointing towards yours, which google loves! Links from quality websites will dramatically improve your ranking. Furthermore, internal links to other pages of your website are also useful to create more traffic on these pages. The last step to simplify navigation is the creation of an XML sitemap. Google will reward it, just as freshness. Every time a WebCrawler returns to your website, it scans it completely and compares it to former scans. If there is very similar or even identical content, Google will downgrade you in the ranking. So don’t neglect your page! And keep updating it.
Website Audit:
I strongly recommend you audit your website as often as you can. There are several programs which help you to avoid errors on your website and provide interesting data as well. One of the most used programs is Google Webmaster Tools, which covers a wide range of useful things. For example, if there is a broken link (e.g. “ERROR 404 – Page not found”) or malware, you will get a notification and an advice on how to fix it. This tool also provides a lot of information to you, e.g. how many users visit each of your pages or which other websites link to your domain. Another useful tool to get information about your website is the Firefox Add-On “SeoQuake”. As soon as you installed it, it appears as a tool bar on the top of your browser and provides you different data about almost every page you enter. I find that the most interesting information of SeoQuake are Google Page Rank and Diagnosis. Google Page Rank goes from 0-10 and shows how good you’re doing; 0 being bad and 10 being outstanding. If you check out some other websites, you will realize, that most of them have a Page Rank between 0 and 5. Five seems to be fairly average and that would already be a great success! Because of the logarithmic graph, on which the Page Rank is based, it gets harder and harder to reach the next level up. So you can be very proud of yourself if you achieved 4 or 5. Diagnosis, another feature of SeoQuake, is also very insightful: it sums up all the relevant indicators and gives you some advice on how to improve your performance. The perfect feature to have a quick overview, at no cost!
Thank you for reading my article about organic SEO.
Moritz Maier-Borst
Moritz is a Junior Marketing Assistant at Sierra Marketing. Moritz has a passion for marketing to help start-up and small businesses grow beyond what they ever thought was possible. Moritz’ work at Sierra Marketing with clients including Study Network Australia, Careers Australia and Empower Institute. Moritz’ work mostly focuses on online marketing, social media and community management as well as market research.
