No matter whether you are just entering the market or operating for some time, occupying the top rank on Google search must be at the back of your mind. However, with ever-evolving algorithms and extensive competition in the market, it’s quite challenging to occupy and retain the top places of Google.
In this blog, we will explore some smartest steps you need to adopt in order to achieve your goal.
Win the Top Rank on Google Search: Best Practices
Following strategies are preached and practised by the trusted experts of digital marketing services. It’s time that you start implementing these.
Create Long-Form Content
Let us start with blogging. These days, we can find that most of the sites occupying the top spots feature long-form content.
Don’t get us wrong. It has nothing to do with length or the number of words.
Basically, it can be assumed that long content is more in-depth and offers a comprehensive outline of the topic. Google seeks to offer valuable insights to the users. The sites that satisfy this criterion have a higher chance to win a high rank.
Further, exhaustive and engaging content drives more traffic to the site due to its varied information and increases dwell time. Since people get ample information on the site, they can share their preferred information while mentioning or linking to the site.
All these lead Google to consider the site to be a valuable source of information.
Optimize for Google Answer Box
Google Answer Box results are more prominent than all the other results. If your content appears in this section, it will gain extensive visibility and exposure. Naturally, it will drive more clicks and traffic. If you want to appear in this section, your site must have lots of merits. It’s better to engage professional SEO services instead of trying amateur hands since it requires extensive effort and experience.
Sometimes, this result is also noted as a zero-click search result. That’s because people can get adequate information right from the answer box and they don’t click. This may make you think that appearing in Google Answer Box is equal to losing traffic.
Well, let’s bust this misconception. Google Answer Box plays a significant role in branding. It helps to create a reputation, brand recognition, and reliability.
Improve Internal Linking Structure
Site architecture is crucial for the search engine bots to properly crawl and index the web pages. This is done by internal links.
A study by Moz asserts that an optimal website structure has a shape of a pyramid with links between the pages. For instance, the homepage is connected to the main category pages and those are linked with related products/service pages.
Other than creating site architecture, it also helps to float link juice from one page to another. This, in turn, will boost the SEO potential of the web pages.
This needs to be done right from the time of website development. Therefore, hire a reputed website development company to build your website maintaining proper structure.
Anchor Text Optimization
An anchor text is used for linking pages and help Google understand the motif of the page. Using keywords is a brilliant practice to guide Google bot to easily comprehend your page content and rank the site higher.
Here are 5 types of anchor texts that you may use:
Exact Match Anchor Text: Such an anchor text uses a keyword that mirrors the page you are linking to. For instance, if one of your keywords is home decor, using “home decor” while linking a page that enlists various types of decorations is an exact match anchor text.
Partial Match Anchor Text: Such a text includes a variation of the primary keyword on the page you are linking to. For instance, “DIY home decor ideas” can be a partial match anchor text as it consists of the phrases your site is trying to rank for.
Generic Anchor Text: Such an anchor text is a generic phrase that links to other pages. Some of its instances may include “click here”, “learn more”, etc.
Branded Anchor Text: As the name suggests, here the anchor text uses the brand name. Say, if your brand name is XYZ, linking “XYZ” to one of your posts will be an instance of a branded anchor text. However, overusing this type of anchor text can seem to be manipulative and suspicious to Google. So it’s better to avoid using it more than once.
Naked Link: If you use the URL as an anchor, it is considered a naked link. These are not an ideal option as they affect readability. While it’s easy to read an anchor text like “excellent home decor ideas”, reading “https://www.xyz.com/story/excellent-home-decor-ideas” is not so smooth!
Check out this blog to learn all about anchor texts.
Full-Proof Guest Posting Strategy
You all know that guest posting is essential for placing your site in front of a wide array of audiences and earning a backlink from a reputed site helps to improve your domain authority. But, you may not know that it’s not a smart move to post blogs on every guest posting site you come across.
Here are a few tips to bear in mind:
- Select relevant websites with high domain authority.
- Check out previously posted articles on the site to get an idea of their expectations.
- Pick topics that will interest the target audience of the site.
- Support your claims with high-authority sources.
- Abide by the blog submission guidelines mentioned on the guest posting site.
Make Use of Rich Snippets
Displaying rich snippets in your Google results is a great way to earn more clicks which in turn, makes Google acknowledge your demand, and improves your rank. The structured data on your page HTML will help Google in displaying proper rich snippets for the searchers. It may include ratings, price, stock availability, etc.
