Keyword ranking is a measure of the visibility and relevance of a website or page on a search engine’s results page (SERP). It refers to how close a website appears to the top of the SERP when a query is entered into a search engine, and is determined by search engine algorithms and the keywords and phrases used in that query.
Keyword ranking is a fundamental part of search engine optimization (SEO), as it ultimately determines how visible your site is compared to your competitors. Thus, ranking highly for relevant keywords is essential to boost your website’s visibility, increase traffic, and ultimately achieve better conversions.
In order to get good keyword rankings, you must understand how search engine algorithms work, develop relevant keyword strategies, and apply best practices.
Search Engine Algorithms
The thing to note about search engine algorithms is that they are constantly changing. It is extremely important to keep up-to-date with the latest changes in order to maintain or improve keyword rankings. The two biggest players in this game are Google and Bing, and both update their algorithms regularly.
Some of the factors that contribute to keyword rankings include page relevance and content quality, page loading speed, link structure, and website usability.
Page Relevance & Content Quality
The content you post on your webpages must be relevant to your target keywords and well-written. Google's algorithms primarily look for pages with high-quality, unique content. Moreover, the content should be kept fresh over time in order to maintain good rankings.
It is also important to use Anchor Text, the visible text in a link, because search engines use anchor text as a signal to determine what pages a link points to, and the relevance of that page to the query.
Also, a website with a good internal link structure can also help with its SERP rankings, so you should ensure that you link your pages together. This gives the search engine algorithms more data to use when determining page relevance and what pages should appear higher on the SERP.
Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed is also important in the equation. Search engine algorithms will take page loading speed into account when ranking pages. If your page takes too long to load, it could negatively impact your keyword ranking, so you should ensure you have optimized your page loading speed. One way of doing this is to reduce the size of your images, javascript files and CSS files, as this will reduce the size of your page and thus the load time.
Website Usability
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Usability is an important factor in the search engine algorithms. Your website should be easy to navigate so that visitors can find what they are looking for and easily access other pages. It should also be easy for search engine crawlers to get to all of your content.
Developing a Keyword Strategy
When developing a keyword strategy, it is important to pick the right keywords for your target audience, as these will be the words and phrases people type most often into search engines when trying to find a business like yours.
One way of doing this is to use a tool like Google Keyword Planner or Keyword.io to identify relevant keywords and find out their search volume. You can also use Google’s Search Console to get insight into what queries people are using to find your website.
Once you have identified your target keywords, you can start to create content around them, adding keywords to page titles and headings and also to posts, blog articles and other copy.
Best Practices
When it comes to improving your SERP rankings, there are a few best practices you can follow.
First, you should focus on content quality over quantity. It is better to post fewer, high-quality pieces of content than lots of low-quality pages, as the engagement and visibility of the content affects its ranking.
Additionally, you should use the target keywords in all of your URLs and meta descriptions, as meta descriptions are used in the SERP to show a brief description of the page’s content, making it more attractive for visitors to click on.
You should also link your content to other high-quality, relevant websites as well as on external websites, as this will help build backlinks and improve your ranking.
Finally, you should ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as search engine algorithms take into account how users are accessing the site. If your site runs slowly or looks bad on mobile, it will most likely suffer in the rankings.
Ultimately, improving keyword rankings takes time, and you should expect to see some fluctuations in your rankings before you achieve stability and improvement.
It is also important to track your progress and make changes when needed. Put simply, regular analysis, optimization and good quality content is the key to getting good rankings and achieving success with Search Engine Optimization.