Anyone who owns a website wants their website to be ranking highly for those keywords which will get them the most targeted visitors so that they can turn into customers or clients. A website’s ranking on search engines (especially Google) is quite important when you take into account the following important statistics:
- 90% of users don’t go past the Page 1 of Google
- 42% of users click on the website on position 1, 12.5% on position 2 and only 8% on position 3
What does this all mean?
This means that if your website is not on Page 1 of Google and in the top 3 positions, then you are effectively missing out on more than 60% of potential visitors (and customers for that matter).
If your website isn’t currently in a good position on the search engines, don’t panic! There are many things you can do to move its rankings up. The following is a list of website ranking factors from the most important:
URL
If you want to rank for a certain keyword, it’s absolutely vital that you have that keyword in your domain name. If you feel tempted to use your company or brand name instead, keep in mind that the goal of ranking at number 1 for your main keyword will only get much harder if you do so.
Domain Age
If you register a brand new domain name, you are going to be starting from scratch. However, a start is a start and as the months and years go by, your website will benefit immensely from this factor. On the other hand, you can get a head start by purchasing an expired domain name which does not currently have an owner. Just make sure that it hasn’t been banned by the search engines before purchasing.
Title Tag
Having the keyword in the title tag of your home page is a MUST. A lot of websites continue to use their company or brand name in their title tag which makes ranking for keywords that much harder. This website ranking factor applies to all pages on your website.
Page Structure
Optimise each page on your website for just 1 keyword. Each page on your website should only be targeting one keyword. Any more and ranking for your target keywords will be that much difficult. Your home page should target the main keyword while other pages should target related, long tailed keywords.
Keyword Density
It’s important that you mention the keyword you are targeting on the relevant page. A good density to aim for is 3% which means that your target keyword only makes up 3% of the text on the page. Any more and your page could be flagged for spam.
Backlinks
You’re probably wondering why backlinks is at the bottom of the list when it is an important factor in getting website rankings. The reason why I put it down there is to emphasise of getting your website set up right first before getting backlinks. Getting hundreds or even thousands of backlinks to a website which is incorrectly optimised will diminish the value of each link in getting rankings.
On the subject of backlinks, it’s important that you get them from a variety of sources while using a variety of anchor text.
The key to a successful website in terms of getting targeted traffic and customers is all in this article. Read it over and over again if you have to. Simply get these website ranking factors right and you will have a immensely successful website before you know it.