7 SEO Tips to Help Google Understand Your Website And Ranking
One of the most important goals for a website owner is to grow online audiences. All the effort and investment in creating and maintaining a website will amount to nothing if no one visits the website.
A website can receive online traffic from many sources. But the majority of the online traffic comes from search engines. A research report found that nearly 51 percent of the online traffic can be sourced from organic search.
You need to optimize your site for both the target audience and search engine to attract online traffic. In this blog post, you will learn about some tips to help search engines particularly Google better understand your website so that it becomes visible on the search results page.
1. Create a Sitemap
Search engines including Google use search spiders or bots to index webpages. These are algorithms or codes that scour the internet for new websites. The process of scouring the internet to find new website content is known as crawling. The activity is also known as search indexing.
Search engine bots process and add millions of new web pages to the search index every day. The web pages that are added to the search index are displayed on the search results.
To make your website visible to the search bots, you should create a sitemap. The document can be in Txt, XML, mRSS, RSS, or Atom formats. It contains a list of all the web pages of your website. The document guides the search bots about the new content.
You can use Google XML Sitemaps to create your website sitemap for free. You can also use XML-Sitemaps.com to create a sitemap for Google, Bing, and outer search engines.
Yoast SEO is another tool that can be used for creating a sitemap for free. The SEO tool can create sitemaps automatically when you create a new website.
Search engine crawlers will read the sitemap to better understand your website. But it may take some time for the crawlers to discover the updated sitemap. To speed up the process of discovering new web pages, you should consider submitting the sitemap to search engines.
2. Submit Sitemap to Search Engine
You can submit your sitemap to search engines using the search engine webmaster tools. Create an account to webmaster tools of the top three search engines – Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
You can then submit the sitemap from the dashboard.
Google Webmaster allows you to add your sitemap by clicking on Crawl then Sitemap and then Add/Test Sitemap. You can access the menu from the Webmaster dashboard. You should enter the address of the sitemap that can be www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. In case you are using the Yoast SEO tool, the address will be www.yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.
3. Post on Social Networks
Another important tip to make your updated web content appears on search engines is to post the links to social networks such as Twitter and Google.
When you share the link to the social networks, Google will become aware of the new content. It will then crawl the web pages and index them. While the links on social media are set no-follow tags, search engines are still able to know of the webpage.
4. Set Preferred Domain
Every website has two domain names. One domain name has “www” before the website name and the other one without the term.
For instance, if you have a website “bestdomainlist.com”, online users can access the website using the following domain names: https:// bestdomainlist.com/ and https://www.bestdomainlist.com/.
While both the domain names point to the same location, they are not the same in the eyes of search engines. You need to submit both the domain names to search engines. In addition, you will also have to tell the search engine what is the preferred domain name.
You can set the preferred domain name from the Google Webmaster dashboard. Click on Site settings in the upper right screen to set the preferred domain address.
5. Include Keywords
Adding the right keywords is critical for search engine optimization (SEO). You need to include relevant keywords in the web content. Optimizing the webpage with keywords will help in the ranking of your site for the selected keywords. It will make it easy for the webpage to appear in the search results of the target users.
Let’s suppose that your website is about selling electronic items. You need to include relevant keywords such as ‘buy electronic items’ or ‘buy iPad online’ in the web content. The three important places where you must add keywords include:
- Heading
- Content
- Meta tags
You can use different tools such as Google Keyword Tool, Wordstream, and Keyword Tool to find out effective keywords related to your website.
6. Park Site During Maintenance
You need to prevent search engine bots from indexing your website when it is under maintenance. You can do this by adding “nofollow” and “nometa” tags in the robots.txt file. This will disallow search bots from following your website when it is under maintenance.
You can mention in the robots.txt file which webpage the search bots can follow and which pages they should ignore. Just make sure to change back the tags to allow bots to follow your site after maintenance is done.
7. Prevent Ad Links from Being Followed
Advertisement links on your website can affect the search engine ranking of your website. This is because search engines consider adding non-relevant links as a spammy technique to boost online ranking.
To prevent search bots from discovering the ad links, you should add, “rel=sponsored” or “rel=nofollow” to prevent ad links from being crawled. This will prevent the search bots from following the links due to which the links won’t negatively affect the search engine rankings of your website.
Final Remarks
You should make an effort to make search bots understand your website to boost its ranking. But you shouldn’t get sidetracked and always remember the real audience.
Online users are the main audience rather than the search bots. You need to optimize your website for online audiences. Focusing on the online audience will ultimately result in a positive impact on your website’s search engine ranking.
Contact igwebs to improve your website’s search engine ranking. Our Huntsville SEO experts at can help you improve the visibility of your online business.
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