You may be patting your back after creating a nice looking website, but it is just the beginning. It is going to take some time before search engines will index your site. And if your website does not rank well in search engines, then nobody is going to visit your site. Here are top 10 tips to improve your website rankings in 2014:
- Add quality content: A two-page site stands no chance of ranking in major search engines. You have to add good quality and original content to your website to make the search engine take notice of your site. The more content you add, the more search engine appreciates and improves your website rankings.
- Do not forget META tags: It may seem strange for 2014, but Google, Bing and Yahoo!, still look for the META tags in your website’s HTML code. Typically, you have to make sure that all pages of your site contain the three most important META tags – keywords, title and description.
- Social media integration: Social networking has changed the way users interact with websites today. You can easily improve your site rankings by integrating Google+, Facebook and Twitter in your site. This way, you can promote your site to millions of people who use the social networking sites.
- Proofread before adding content: There is nothing as bad as adding grammatically incorrect or misspelled content to your website. The visitors will notice it immediately and get an impression that your site is being run by amateurs. They will soon lose interest and leave your website.
- Add quality backlinks: A search engine evaluates the rank of your website by finding out the number and quality of links pointing to your site. This is why it is very important to get regular and quality backlinks from different sites. It is even better to get the backlinks from the sites belonging to the same niche as your own site.
- Use a standard web analytics tool: You can use a standard web analytics tool like Google analytics or Bing webmasters tool to find out all about your site visitors (e.g., their country of origin, which pages they visit and how often). This way, you can concentrate more on the topics that are becoming more popular on your site and improve your overall site rank.
- Add fresh content regularly: While adding quality and original content is important, it is even more important to add the content regularly. If you site sits idle for some days, then search engines will start to ignore it and you will lose your site rankings. To improve your site rankings, you should add at least fresh content to your site regularly.
- Ping the search engines: Usually a search engine crawls your website once a day or after every few days to look for the new content on your site. But you can also notify search engines by pinging them about your new content, so that they can crawl your new content as soon as you have added it. You can use free services like Ping-o-matic for pinging search engines.
- Avoid low quality backlinks: Creating backlinks is crucial for improving your website rankings, but they can damage the rankings if you add backlinks from low quality, non-authoritative or unethical sites. Getting backlinks from such sites can result in the search engines penalizing your site, thus lower its rankings.
- Build relationship with audience: If you want regular and returning visitors to your site, then you have to build relationship with your visitors. You should respond to all the email messages, comments and inquiries that your visitors send you. Not responding to your site visitors is not only rude, but also ruins any possibility of the free word-of-mouth marketing that you can get from them.
