Here at WriteForMe, we spend a lot of time with clients discussing ways to improve Google rankings with customers. We are, after all a content marketing company. We discuss everything from how to rank, why Google works the way it does, what search engine rules are, and what you can do on a weekly basis to keep up with any updates to algorithms.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a set it and forget it type of method. SEO takes constant updating on your website. It is one of the oldest methods of marketing out there, and it is still (if not the only) one of the best ways to improve your ranking on Google. However, it isn’t so hard to learn or understand.

Once your website starts to improve in rankings you will be known as a leader in your industry, your social media posts will get shown more in your fans, you can even beat out paid advertising. When SEO is properly implemented you attract your target audience giving you the income to take time and do what you love to do. How is that for an incentive!

Here are three ways to help improve your ranking:

Write More Content!

Why should you be posting more content (everyone always asks us)? Search engines pull fresh content over old content which provides you with ranking authority. Bottom line. It is the law of the internet.

Your website is so important for your business. You want people to find you, read your hard work, and ultimately sign up for your product or service. Pages that don’t change much like your About page or Contact Us page are called Static Pages, and Search Engines stop ‘looking’ at these static pages because nothing changes. So consider this: If you have a website, with a blog and you simply post a lot of ‘posts’ all at once and then do not touch it for a year:  Google will stop ‘crawling’ your site because it looks static. That is not a good thing. You want to constantly add to your website with new content pieces so that Google keeps crawling it and ranking you higher in results.

Additional Ideas Regarding Your Blog:

• If you don’t like the word Blog call this section something else! News, Latest Posts, Resources, Trends…
• Post at least once a week to keep content fresh (this is where we can help you)
• Include social buttons so people can share your content
• Have a Content Marketing schedule and stick to it

Name Photos Before Uploading

This one is always a surprise to most people. You need to correctly name your photos before uploading them to your blog post. Why? So Humans & Search Engines Can Find Your Photos. Best practice for photo naming is to use Underscores (_) in between your descriptive words, in lower case lettering.

For Example:

content_marketing_technology_california_sky.jpg

Note: images uploaded with names like DCN_15593.jpg don’t mean anything to anyone or search engines. Imagine every time you search for something in Google and go to the Images area. How do you think Google is showing you those images? It’s because they have been correctly named.

Please also consider taking advantage of adding ALT text to your image. This description is also what gets automatically pulled and shared to places Pinterest as the description. You will usually see space for this description when you upload our photo.

Consider Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of SEO keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. There is no specific % of how many times your keyword should appear on your page, however, the rule of thumb is about 2%. So, if your page has 1,000 words use your keyword 20 times. Now, 20 times may seem like a lot, but once you factor in using a keyword at the beginning, middle, end, in the headings, and sprinkled throughout, it isn’t so bad.

Where Should You Put Your Keyword?

• Page Title
• Meta Tag Description
• URL
• The first sentence of your page
• Image file name
• Alt Image Description
• Throughout our text

Note: Please do not over add your keyword. It is called Keyword Stuffing. Meaning you try to trick the search engines. Google knows this trick and will penalize your entire site.

Conclusion

If after reading this you think “Do I Really Have The Time To Update My Site?” let us remind you: Your website is open 24 hours a day. Breaking up the methods into stages above drastically removes the overwhelm of a large project. And really, how long has your site been up and running without gaining any traction? Too long. So, it’s not a matter of if you have time, it’s a matter of will you take the time to do it right so you can remove overwhelm from your life.

If you are having trouble getting organic traffic, not making any money through your websites products or services, or just plain confused why your blog posts, that took forever to write, and look horrible when shared to social media than let us help you. At WriteForMe we provide you with 10 long-format articles a month with 2 images and 2 social media posts. That way you can constantly have fresh content as we talked about above, and your Google ranking will improve!

Imagine waking up to new articles to use each week and after you post them, you rank higher in Google. It’s a win-win!