I am an online marketer who has been through the stress of watching my website falling from its ranks without any apparent reason.
It is after a lot of experimenting that I was finally able to unravel the secrets of search engine rankings and then decided to set up this website to help out others who are likely to face the same situation I did.
Much of this website is dedicated to discussing the various techniques that are used by online marketers worldwide to achieve a respectable rank on search engines. So the onus is on you to go through the content and figure out what is best for you in terms of marketing your business.
In the absence of any one-formula-fits-all solution, the best I can do is enumerate the problems that online marketers face and suggest ways of solving them.
In case you have any more questions, do get in touch with me at the following id - jacob[at]searchstandard[dot]com
- Jacob
Are you Worried About Your Search Engine ranking?
How
did my ranking drop all of a sudden without an explanation?’ If you are an
online marketer, this is a woe that you must be familiar with either through
personal experience or by observing others. For any online business, it is
important to rank well in search engines because this is an assurance of high
visibility and higher traffic, which in turn translates to increased
business. In such a situation, losing your ranking on a search engine is the
worst possible nightmare and one that causes a lot of stress to many a website
owners.
There are several reasons that could be responsible for your website’s plunge from a position of prominence into oblivion, primary among them being an algorithm update by Google. Every once in a while, Google – the most popular search engine globally – updates its algorithms which causes websites to lose their rankings till the new changes are incorporated. Other issues could range from detection of malware to broken links, plagiarized content to server issues and would need to be fixed for the website to regain its position at the top of the page.
Understanding the Concept of Search Engine Optimization
Is SEO truly rocket science as most online marketers regard it to be? Unfortunately this is a myth that most online marketers believe in because the only thing that SEO requires is a bit of in-depth understanding. Rather than believe all the misinformation, you would do well to focus on key aspects related to this subject and develop a keen interest as to how it works.
Being aware of the basics is a good place to start and following are the website details which you must pay attention to owing to their impact on your website’s search engine ranking –
Domain Name – While exact match domains (EMDs) no longer work as well as they used to (after the EMD update), I still feel that partial match domains (PMDs) work very well as long as your website has some authority. Therefore, you must make it a point to ensure that your domain name is reflective of the nature of your website as also your business. A brandable PMD works quite well.
Domain Authority - You domain gets authority as it accumulates backlinks from other websites. If you are starting new, you could purchase an expired domain which already has backlinks and therefore authority by default. Check out my recent Register Compass review.
Content – Content is truly the proverbial king as far as your website’s ranking is concerned and to this effect, you must ensure that your website’s content is useful, informative and pertaining to your business. Longer content seems to outrank shorter content, so I suggest you have at least 1000 words on every page that you want to rank. I've seen some sites rank well with 3,000 to 5,000 words - so don't be scared of creating really long articles. Check out this SerpIQ study about the same.
Keyword
Density – This refers to the frequency with which the keyword or key phrase
appears on the webpage and ideally it should be between 0.5 to 2.5%. While minimal
usage of keywords may not be intercepted by search engine spiders, over usage
could cause stuffing which in turn could result in your website being penalized
by Google.
Strong Website Basics – As long as the basic structure of your website is in accordance with laid-down conventions, the probability of it being regarded as credible is high and this would contribute positively towards its position in terms of search engine results. Make sure that your crawl structure is good and architect your website such that it is easy for GoogleBot to crawl.
H1 Tags – Embedding keywords and key phrases in headings and titles are important to help boost ranking of your website. Apart from keywords, remember to use synonyms and other similar words.
Title & Description - These are very important for the Click through rate (CTR) of your site in the serps. I believe that organic CTR does impact your SEO rankings.
Frequent Updating – Updating your website with new and unique features every now and then is an effective technique of inviting search engine spiders and ensuring that it is intercepted for its credibility.
Content Promotion - Creating content alone will not help your rankings. You need to make sure that you spend time promoting the content that you create. For every piece of content that I create I spend the same amount of time reaching out to people to try and get the content shared and linked naturally.