Are you hoping to see a significant increase in the number of organic clicks to your website each day?
How about 10,000, or perhaps even more?
It is possible to achieve the aforementioned numbers, as many websites have done so. If you want your blog to receive those numbers, then you have to rank it in Google’s top 10 search results. I personally have gotten my website up to 36,000 visitors a day through these techniques.
What Does It Mean to “Rank’’ on Google?
Getting your website listed in the search results when someone Googles a term or question is what ranking a blog on Google means. This is something that most website owners want to achieve as it can result in gaining a lot of traffic to their site.
There’s a catch, though.
How many times do you go to page five of Google’s search results? How often do you even make it to the second page?
If you want people to click on your website from the search results, your website needs to be in the top 10 of the search results.
Being in the top 10 search results on Google is important because that is where most of the traffic comes from.
9 Tips on How to Get Your Blog Rank in Google’s Top 10
achieving this ranking If you want your blog to rank in Google’s top 10 for your target keywords, you can get thousands of clicks to your website each day. However, this also brings competition, so it’s not as easy as just creating a blog and having it immediately rank high. You have to work to achieve this ranking.
Getting a high ranking on Google requires being consistent; it means doing the right things repeatedly and becoming a trustworthy source of value for your readers.
It is a process, and when you follow the steps, you’re likely to rank your blogs in the top 10 spots.
1. Research what’s currently ranking in the top 10 results for the keywords you want to rank on.
Why should Google rank your blog in the top 10? Your blog should be ranked in the top 10 by Google because it is high quality and provides useful information to readers.
It is trying to send customers to more reliable websites that will give them the best answers to their questions.
If you want Google to consider you an expert on a topic, your blog posts should be focused on that topic. This way, your audience can find the information they’re looking for.
This is where your keyword research comes in.
Ubersuggest is a tool you can use to understand how users search Google, which can give you ideas about what types of content to write. For example, if you type in “investment banking,” you might find other keywords that people are searching for, such as “investment banking salary,” “investment banking analyst,” and “investment banking jobs.”
Once you’ve made a list of relevant keywords, then it’s time to check out your competition. Through Ubersuggest, or by typing the keywords into Google, you can analyze the results that already feature in the top 10 to find out what makes them successful:
- How long is the content?
- What topics do they discuss?
- What type of domain are they (if they’re .edu, they can be difficult to beat)?
To find out what makes a successful Google ranking, look at the competition. The algorithm is complicated, but observing other successful pages can give you an idea of what Google is looking for. Create your own posts about similar topics, using the strategies that you see employed on successful pages.
2. Optimize for on-page SEO.
On-page SEO is about optimizing your website’s pages to make them more likely to rank on search engines. This includes things like choosing relevant keywords, structuring your pages’ HTML, and making sure your site is easy to navigate.
I believe that offering value to the reader is the most important part of blogging, but you also need to be able to show the value of your content to the search engines. Google is not a human, so it does not understand content in the same way that your readers do. It has its own language, and if you want your blog to appear in the top 10 search results, you need to make sure it is communicating properly with Google.
Although Google’s algorithms have significantly improved in the past decade, you will still need to use relevant keywords if you want your content to rank for those specific terms. This is because Google needs to see that the keyword is central to your topic.
You can do this by including keywords in:
- headers
- meta descriptions
- image files
- page content
- alt text
- URL
It’s important not to get too caught up with using keywords and to remember that your user comes first. If you stuff keywords into your text too often, it won’t look or feel natural and will turn human readers away.
Google understands the importance of user experience, so a big part of your on-page SEO is making sure you tick these boxes. People want a clean and fast user experience, so it’s important to take care of the following as well:
- don’t keyword stuff
- optimize images
- break your page down into easy-to-read sections
- avoid thin content
The basics of on-page SEO–or optimizing your blog for search engines–is important to ensuring your blog is successful. Each time you make a change or update, be sure you’re taking SEO into account.
3. Keep important content above the fold.
This text is discussing how people scroll on websites. The author argues that it is important to keep important information in the top 768 pixels of a website, as research has shown that people spend most of their time looking at information above the fold.
The next topic is sliders, which are fairly popular. I personally don’t like sliders because I feel like they confuse the user. When a user arrives on a webpage and the area above the fold is mostly taken up by a slider, the user then has to search for what they’re looking for.
That’s never a good user experience.
Position your slider so that it is the most important thing a user sees when they arrive at your site.
4. Keep the number of links on a page under 100.
Google does not recommend having more than 100 links on a single page for design and user experience purposes, though Matt Cutts published a page with close to 200 links on it.
Google recommends you limit the number of links to 100 because if a page has more than 100 links, Google will have a harder time indexing it.
If you place more than 100 links on a page, Google “might” crawl you and view you as a spammer.
If you have over a hundred links on your page, like Cutts does, you will only pass on a limited amount of PageRank.
It is now more important to create a positive experience for the user than to focus on PageRank or SEO, so it is a good idea to limit the number of links on a page to 100.
5. Limit your ad space.
If you want your blog to have good SEO, you need to limit the number of ads. If you don’t, it will take longer to load, which will decrease traffic.
If you use ads, it is better to only have a few that perform well, rather than have a lot of ads that frustrate users.
6. Design your site for speed.
After conducting an initial evaluation of your website, the next step is to analyze site speed. Site speed is important because it has been shown to affect user satisfaction. In fact, research conducted by Google showed that slowing down search results by as little as 400 milliseconds can result in a reduction of searches by more than half a percent.
In SEO, speed is not as important of a signal as relevance. However, like most things online, when it comes to speed, problems can accumulate, so you should try to fix as many as you can.
This is another way of helping you improve the speed of your site. The Site Performance page in Google’s Webmaster Tools can give you detailed insights into how your site is performing globally, including average response times and monthly trends. You can also find recommendations on how to improve your site’s speed.
Since the only cost to improve your site speed is how much effort you put in, it is worth doing.
7. Keep your images small.
Images are very important to web content now. This is why I have written articles like “Forget Blogging as Usual”, which show that using images and graphics is necessary to attract readers.
However, an image that has been enlarged can slow down the speed of the page being downloaded, which in turn decreases the speed of the site. Therefore, the easiest way to fix this issue is to save images as .jpg files and text/headers as .gif files. If there is an image that is not a .jpg file, then use a tool to change it to a .jpg file.
. The Performance Golden Rule states that a large majority of the user experience is based on the downloading of images, stylesheets, flash files, etc. Therefore, it is beneficial to utilize a Content Delivery Network like Akamai in order to spread this content across multiple servers.
A CDN is a set of servers that cache your web objects like scripts, URLs, text and graphics, which reduces site latency and stress on a single server. In other words, you improve site speed.
8. Crawl and validate your site.
When you are designing a website for search engine optimization, you need to crawl and validate your site to determine where you are in the process.
What should you test and how? You must validate:
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- Accessibility (Section 508 and WAI Standards)
- Dead links
- Feeds
- Multiple browsers
- Multiple devices
You can use the Crawl Tools by SEOmoz or the W3C validation tools to test your website and find all the documents that need fixing, prioritizing them as you go.
After you’ve determined and fixed all the issues, figure out which ones are the most important and fix those first. Then, have other people test it to see how user-friendly it is.
9. Get backlinks.
If your next-door neighbor was to tell you to buy stocks in BMW this week, you would most likely ask why and look into whether other people are saying the same thing.
We would like some proof that the information we are being given is credible, and Google wants to see the same thing when it comes to your blog. It wants to find out who is supporting what you say by looking at your link profile (the links on external websites that lead to your pages).
If more people are linking to what you say, and those people are seen as authoritative, Google will be more likely to trust your information.
Google’s algorithm has become better at understanding the meaning of the content, but backlinks are still one of the most important factors in ranking.
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