How to Rank a Keyword: The Guide That Actually Tells You How!

If you do business online (who doesn’t?), then optimizing your site for search is crucial. Organic search results are an excellent place to advertise to potential buyers and reach new clients.

Unfortunately, a lot of misinformation exists about how to improve your website and build links to it. The following guide covers key points you should address on your website, and the link building methods you can use to drive your rankings higher, increasing the traffic you receive from organic search.

Sound on page SEO builds a solid foundation for your search marketing efforts. Failing to optimize the key areas we are going to cover below will greatly reduce the effectiveness of your link building efforts, costing you time and money.

1-Key On Page SEO Factors:

Unless you work in SEO, many of you will not have time to optimize every single factor of your website, so we are going to touch on the key areas that you must improve to gain higher rankings.

2-Site Speed:

Recently Google received a patent on their site speed ranking algorithm but industry professionals have known it is an important factor for quite some time now. When you are developing a website, the speed of your pages should be a key consideration. Recent coding improvements allow you to have a visually appealing site that still loads quickly so there is no reason for a slow site. If you are hiring a web designer, make sure they take load time into consideration when building your site.The bottom line is a slow site is a low ranking site.

3-Site Navigation

The navigation of your website is very important for users and for search engines. A proper internal linking structure will allow users to easily reach pages and should lead them to take the desired action for you website. Aside from helping users, the internal links of your site will provide search engines with a hierarchy of your website. If you sell construction services you may have a services page that links to specific services, a very simple example of a hierarchy. Remember, the more important a page is, the fewer clicks it should be from the home page of your site.

4-Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

Every page on your website should be unique and should have a purpose. The purpose, message, or keyword of each page should be conveyed by the page title. The meta description is a short summary of what the page is about and should boost click-through rates. I like to search my target keyword and read the ad copy for the terms. This gives you several good ideas for page titles and meta descriptions, most of the time they have been tested and optimized. Send your competitors a thank you card for testing and sharing the best variations with you! (Just to clarify you should not copy their ads, just use them to point you in the right direction.)

5-Meta Keywords:

For some reason people still add meta Keywords to pages. They never help you rank and are now used by Bing to look for spam pages. Don’t waste your time adding meta keywords.

6-Creating Content:

The ability for your website to rank all starts with on page SEO. Before you begin building your website, you should decide on 1-2 keywords that will be targeted on each page of your website. While the old practice of mentioning specific variations of the keyword repeatedly are not necessary, you do need to include your primary keyword in the page title, at least one heading and URL if possible. The body content should have variations of your keywords (known as LSI keywords) and should make mention of terms associated with the context of your page.
Simply put, if your target keyword is “buy a helmet”, you want to have that term in the title, heading, and url. In the body you should talk about what type of helmets you have, what the helmets are for, and so on. This allows Google to understand your content based on context. If you have enough unique helmets, you could make a page for each specific type of helmet. Do not make a page unless you have enough content to warrant it, as thin pages won’t rank very often. Each page of your site should be the Wikipedia of your keyword.

7-Alt Text for Images

Most websites have several images, but people often forget to optimize them. Adding alt text to all the images on your site will help Google understand what the image and page is about. While keyword stuffing is a waste of time, including your keyword on at least one image on each page has been correlated with higher search rankings. This is a simple fix, just make sure you add alt text to your images.
If you already have a website or you want to judge just how optimized your pages are, here are some quick questions you should ask yourself about each page you’re working on.

• Does my site load quickly?
• Is my keyword in page title?
• Is my keyword in the URL?
• Does each page have a unique meta description?
• Is my keyword in the h1, h2, and h3 headings?
• Did I include the keyword in a least one image Alt Text?
• Does my page have rich media or videos?
• Are keyword variations in the body content?
• Have I linked out to relevant and authoritative external sources?
• Does the page have 500+ words of unique and valuable content?
• Are there a ton of grammatical or spelling errors on the page?
• Did I include name, address, and phone (NAP) for geo-targeted keyword pages?
• Is my page easy to share socially?

Once you have your on page SEO dialed in, the real work begins. Regardless of what you may hear, link building is still one of the most important factors in determining how well a page performs in the SERPs so below I am going to share 5 techniques that will help your site rank higher.