How to Improve Google Rankings
Tips for improving Google Search Rankings
Having a strong presence on the internet is important for ensuring current and potential customers alike find your website and auctions. If you don’t have a strong website that is properly optimized, it will not appear in Google’s Search Results. One of the most likely reasons your website is not appearing in search results is that it is not crawlable, and therefore cannot be indexed. To fix this issue, it is important to understand how Google crawls and indexes your website to determine rankings on search engine results pages. Read on to learn the process of how Google crawls and indexes websites and what you can do to improve your Google rankings.
It is important to understand the basics of how Google and other search engines crawl a website. The first step in the crawling process begins with a list of web addresses (URLs) from past crawls and sitemaps provided by the website owners. The crawlers move through your website via links until they cannot find any more pages. After they have crawled your pages, they become indexed, and software determines your Google search ranking and how your different website pages will appear in Google’s search results. There are a few different ways to help Google index your website and help your pages rank higher in the search results:
Google Search Console
One of the best ways to manage your web presence and Google rankings is with a Google Search Console account. In Google Search Console, you can view analytics, any mobile responsiveness issues that might occur, see the number of website pages that have been crawled and indexed, and you can also submit sitemaps of your website. Google Search Console allows users to provide detailed instructions about how to crawl and process pages on their website, request a recrawl, or opt out of crawling altogether. In your account, you can see if there are any errors on your web pages as well as see the number of indexed pages and the number of non-crawled, omitted pages.
Learn more about Google Search Console
Google My Business
Having a Google My Business Listing is another great tool to help Google and its crawlers know that your website and business are legit and have credible authority. If you don’t have a Google My Business listing yet, it is easy to get started! If you already have one, make sure to have it updated with the most updated and recent information for your company. Adding pictures and responding in a timely manner to customer reviews will also help increase your overall authority on the web and therefore boost your rankings.
Learn more about Google My Business
Links
Another way to boost your rankings is by making your pages easier to crawl. Links are one of the most important factors that determine page crawlability. Google’s crawlers move through your website via links, jumping from one to the other until all the crawlable pages have been identified. Google can tell the difference between new links, existing links that they have already crawled, and dead links that don’t work anymore or have an error. It is important to have both internal and external links on your website pages. Internal links help the crawlers move from page to page when indexing your site and external links help your website build authority which will help improve your overall ranking and make your website appear closer to the top of the search engine results pages.
Page Title & Keywords
Utilizing keywords and appropriate page titles is one of the more obvious, well-known tips you can implement to help improve rankings. If you write a blog post and post it to your website, be sure that the title of that page is related to the topic of your blog post. It will help your blog post and the page that it’s on be found by crawlers more easily and rank better if the topic is clear. Having your page titles listed as H1 headers will also help Google’s crawlers find the page and be able to more accurately index it. It is also important to have correct, relevant keywords on your web pages. If your company hosts antique auctions, your website and keywords on your pages should be about antique auctions. It wouldn’t make much sense for your website to have keywords related to farm equipment, so be sure to make the overall theme/topic clear and stick with it. Yoast SEO is a great WordPress plugin that can be installed on the backend of your website to help you optimize for keywords on each page.
Submit a Sitemap
Lastly, another way to help Google index your website is by submitting a sitemap. A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, photos, videos, and other files on your website and how they all connect. Sitemaps help search engines like Google how to better crawl your website. A sitemap provides Google with a list of all the pages and files you think are the most important and what to focus on. Sitemaps can also include information about when pages were last updated, how often the page is changed, and if there are any alternate language versions of a page. If your pages are properly linked and optimized, Google is usually good at finding them all. However, if you are unsure or your website is more complex and changes often (i.e.: auction websites) it is a good idea to submit a new, updated one occasionally.
Learn more about sitemaps
If your website pages aren’t showing up in Google’s search results page, it could be because your website is not optimized for crawlability and it cannot be indexed by Google. Try and implement these ideas and see if it helps improve your site’s rankings! Need help or want even more ideas on how to improve Google rankings? Give us a call or contact us today to get started!