10 SEO tips to get your website to the top of Google search

10 SEO tips to get to the top of Google

1) Optimise for RankBrain

RankBrain is Google’s machine-learning AI system, which has been revealed by Google to one of the top three ranking signals in its vast array of contributing factors.

Google uses RankBrain to handle ambiguous or unique questions that have never been asked before. Brand new queries make up to 15% of all searches a day – and as Google processes 3bn searches daily – this means that 450m searches a day are entirely unique.

Machine learning is clearly necessary to cope with this huge demand, and for search marketers it may be difficult to truly optimise for.

However according to our recent post on how to optimise content for RankBrain, you can do so in a number of ways, the most important being… Create content that answers unique queries that are particularly relevant to your audience personas.

This will take time, research and a little trial & error, but with enough references and supporting information in your clearly formatted, long-form content, you may start to see more visibility for relevant queries.

2) Optimise for ‘near me’ search queries

According to Google, ’micro-moments’ are the “critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends.”

This basically points to mobile as being the key driver for local search, and how essentially you should be optimising for exactly that.

As Chris Lake mentions in his post on optimising for micro-moments, mobile searchers are a) very active and b) not brand loyal, so there’s a huge opportunity, especially as many businesses are lagging behind due to poor mobile user experiences.

The advice here is to be all about anticipation, relevance and ease of use…

3) Optimise your local presence

Following on from the last point, it’s no good optimising for ‘near me’ search queries if you’re not actually ‘there’. So you need to sort out your local SEO.

You can do this by optimising your Google My Business page. Among many others things, you’ll need to make sure you have the following features…

A long and unique description of your business.

Choose the right categories.

Key information on opening times.

Lots of imagery.

Regular updates.

A local phone number and business address.

And one of the other major local SEO factors is making sure you have lots of visible customer reviews, which as Graham Charlton states are “vital for local businesses, whether or not they sell online, thanks to their sheer prominence in local search results.”

4) Optimise for natural language and voice search

In Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends report, it states that Google Voice Search queries have risen 35x since 2008.

Why this explosion in voice search? Voice input is 4x faster than typing, you will therefore have access to faster results. There are obvious accessibility issues. People have difficulty typing on certain devices. People also like to avoid confusing menus. Ultimately no matter how mobile-optimised a site is, or how big our phones are getting, searching on a mobile is still damn fiddly.

Google has worked hard to improve its search engine so it can better understand superlatives, ordered items, points in time and complex combinations.

The key to optimising for voice search therefore is to provide content for more direct questions. Those that are spoken in a far more natural language than the one we normally use when typing into a search engine, where keywords are dominant.

5) Answer a question

Following on from optimising for natural language is being able to directly answer questions with your content.

Google scrapes third party websites in order to present searchers with a clear on-SERP answer to their more ‘knowledge-based queries’ (when is Kanye West’s birthday? etc). Although Wikipedia used to be the dominant site in these answer boxes, this is becoming less so as Google recognises that more quality expert content is coming from other publishers.

So find out what questions your site can answer and create content that does exactly that. It will help if you’re as succinct as possible, you phrase the question in the headline and you answer the question as soon in the article as possible.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning: What are the opportunities for search marketers? Best of 2017: Our top 5 articles in SEO Best practices for anchor text optimization in 2018 How to highlight search opportunity and create a keyword difficulty metric

6) Pay for it

Some things are still very much a truism now as they were in 2013… You can just ignore all of these tips just by paying your way to the top with PPC ads.

Although you will still need quality ad copy, relevant landing pages and high customer rated products (especially if your entering into the Product Listing Ads space), but yes, you can still throw money at the problem.

However, here we’ll tell you why your ads don’t necessarily need to come first in the new look SERPs anymore.

7) Get in Top Stories, implement AMP

Getting your site into Google News has always been a sure fire way to drive short-term traffic to your content.

It’s not great for evergreen appeal, but if you can be hot off the presses with good quality news stories than it can also be great for other sites linking to you as a source.

Top Stories is the mobile equivalent of the desktop In the News section, and right now this section is filling up with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is Google’s open-source program that allows webmasters the ability to create super-quick, stripped-down, instantly loading versions of web-pages for mobile users.

AMP isn’t a ranking signal yet, but if you’re appearing in Top Stories than having AMP pages will help improve user experience. Here’s a tutorial on how to implement AMP successfully.

Also note that AMP results will be appearing throughout the mobile SERP by the end of the year.

8) Be mobile optimised

You should have this nailed by now. Although three years ago many of you didn’t, and back then it wasn’t a ranking signal. It is now though!

But to help you out, we’ve published this massive and comprehensive guide to testing the mobile usability of your site. You’re welcome.

9) Speed up your website

As I mentioned earlier, AMP is certainly helping to speed up the mobile web. Although it is controversial in nature, and isn’t necessarily the best solution to improving the speed of websites in general as it just feels like a ‘quick fix’.

You do still need to prioritise the speed of your actual site, not just grafting on Google-owned patches. Site speed is a ranking factor, but there are many ways you can improve performance.

First, check your site speed using this tool and then you can access a report breaking-down where you can improve.

You can also make a huge difference in reducing page load by following these image optimisation SEO tips for site speed.

10) Optimise your Twitter presence

Although this may be the final tip in this list, it’s obviously not the last thing you can optimise to get to the top of Google. However one major change to the SERP in the last few years has been the introduction of tweets.

Last year, thanks to a deal between Twitter and Google, tweets are now indexed on SERPs. So if you search for a brand, publisher or personality, you will now see a live timeline of their latest tweets.

Reference Link: https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/08/17/10-tips-to-get-your-website-to-the-top-of-google-search/

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pros and cons details

AMP Pros

#1 It speeds up website load time
This one is obvious. With no useless elements to slow them down, AMPs are lean, slick, and fast. Users enjoy pages that don’t make them wait, so AMPs basically guarantee that your site brings in more visitors.

#2 It increases mobile ranking
Although AMP is not a ranking factor by itself, it has a positive influence on mobile ranking due to its faster load time. Potentially, if Google starts prioritizing AMPs, it will have even more of an effect on SERPs.

#3 It improves server performance
If your site generates tons of traffic from mobile, AMP will reduce the load on your servers and improve their performance. But this has a huge downside (see con #3).


AMP Cons

#1 Ad revenue is reduced

Though Accelerated Mobile Pages Project supports ads, the potential to bring in revenue is severely limited. And it is not a piece of cake to implement ads on AMP-run pages as well.

#2 Analytics are a bit stripped

AMP supports Google Analytics but requires a different tag, which needs to be implemented on all AMP pages. Obviously, it takes a lot of time to place this tag and be able to collect and analyze data.


#3 Amazing speed is achieved, thanks to cache
Google doesn’t offer any specific technology to make your pages super fast. What it actually does is saves cached versions of AMP-tagged pages and, whenever visitors access them, simply serves them up from the cache. You figure out the rest.

AMP allows your site to load faster and guarantees better UX, but its disadvantages raise several serious questions:

Are you ready to sacrifice at least a part of your ad revenue?
Can you live without all the charts and tables in Google Analytics?
And, most importantly: Are you so sure that you want to depend on Google through cache?
These are no easy questions, but you should definitely consider detailed answers to them. But before you do it, let’s compare AMP and responsive design.




Reference Link: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/do-i-need-amp/181292/

Buying a pre-owned domain? Check these things first

Purchasing a previously owned domain can be risky, but columnist Stephanie LeVonne has some tips to help you vet the domain and ensure a smooth site migration.

With over 1 billion websites on the World Wide Web today, it comes as no surprise that the domain name you may want to use is already owned by someone else. Luckily, in some cases, the current owner might be willing to part with it — for the right price.

Acquiring a pre-owned domain can have a drastic impact on your SEO efforts, so it is important to approach such a purchase with caution. It is recommended that you do your due diligence — it’s not uncommon for a domain name to have changed hands many times, and just like buying a used car, it’s often difficult to get the full history.

While examining the SERPs and scanning for any spammy links may be a good first step, it’s important to conduct a thorough assessment to ensure that the domain does not have a manual action penalty or warning from Google. There are many small issues that may not initially be cause for concern; however, in aggregate, these problems can seriously hamper your domain’s ability to rank.

If you’ve bought, or are looking to buy, a pre-owned domain, read below for 10 things you should check before proceeding with a site migration:

1. Google Search Console

Obtaining access to the Google Search Console account is critical for analyzing the health of the domain you’re looking to acquire. If you don’t have the credentials to this account, it’s worthwhile to reach out to the current admin and request access. Likewise, if this property hasn’t been set up, you can request forOnce logged into the Search Console account, you’ll want to go to Search Traffic > Manual Actions and look for any notes on the account.

You can also click on Security Issues, which will notify you if Google suspects that your website has been hacked.

While you can still make a valid assessment about the domain’s health by performing other checks, it’s highly recommended that you access Google Search Console if possible, since this is the only way to see manual action penalties on the domain.

2. Google Analytics & Bing Webmaster Tools

If you have access to Google Analytics (GA), poke around the account and make note of any abnormal traffic patterns or unusual URLs receiving organic traffic. You can also look at referral traffic to determine if spammy websites are mainly responsible for driving traffic to the site. If the site does not have GA set up, you won’t be able to backfill the data, therefore making this check null and void.

Similar to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools has a site security section that will alert you about malware, phishing attempts and changes in your sites SSL certificate status. You can also visit the “Page Traffic” report under Reports & Data to assess the top landing pages, much like GA.

3. Site indexation (SERP analysis)

Use the site search operator [site:yourwebsite.com] to conduct a Google search, and check for any spammy or malicious landing pages in the SERPs. You can also add on the search operator [inurl:keyword], replacing “keyword” with red flag terms like “online games,” “gambling,” “porn” and so on.

While Google typically displays a warning in the SERPs when it detects a hacked site, not all content may be flagged. Read here for a more comprehensive look at a hacked site.

4. Blacklist status

Your domain may be blacklisted if there is a history of sending spammy emails, which may in turn lead to your email server’s IP address getting blocked. You can check the Blacklist status of the domain you seek to acquire by using Site Securi.

5. Internal & external linking

One telltale sign of domain misuse is link manipulation. A compromised domain may use overly specific anchor text phrases to link out to other spammy content. In some cases, when hackers want to remain even more elusive, the anchor text will remain unchanged, making link manipulation even harder to detect.

Fortunately, you can use a tool such as Screaming Frog, which allows you to crawl up to 500 URLS for free. Once in the program, click the “outlinks” tab at the bottom to see what a specific URL links to.

When looking at external linking, you can use a tool like Majestic to get a snapshot of the backlink profile. From here, you can take a deep dive into other off-page factors, such as the referring domains which send the most backlinks to the site.

You can even get as granular as seeing which TLDs (top-level domains) your backlinks are coming from. For example, if you have a US-based website and notice that 90 percent of your backlinks are coming from Taiwan, that may be cause for concern.

Similarly, having a disproportionate amount of backlinks coming from one or more sites that may imply that the domain used a pay-to-play strategy to acquire those links, or perhaps the site has been the unfortunate recipient of negative SEO.

6. Anchor text usage

Another important but often overlooked off-page factor is anchor text usage. Anchor text is simply a word or phrase that is hyperlinked and takes a user to your website. Anchor text signals topical relevancy to Google — for example, if you have a page about women’s fleece pajamas, it would be ideal for other sites to link to that page using that phrase or something similar.

f you plan to wipe all content off the domain you are purchasing, these anchor text phrases will lead to 404 pages, thus having no effect on the site. However, if there are any links pointing to the home page that use anchor text that is not in line with your content, it’s recommended you reach out to webmasters to update their anchor text or remove the links altogether.

This could be a problem if numerous sites are linking to the domain you plan to acquire using location-specific anchor text. For example, if you sell women’s designer shoes in the US, and most of the anchor text says “Designer boots Paris,” then you may be sending Google mixed signals and implying that your company is based in France.

7. Local citations

Local citations that reference your business’s NAP (Name, Address and Phone number) are a critical local ranking signal. A citation is whenever your NAP information shows up on another website or directory. Before migrating to a pre-owned website, you should identify all instances of NAP that appear on the web and update them. There are several ways to make these updates:

Identify which, if any, big data providers (e.g., Localeze, Factual, InfoGroup) were previously being utilized. Updating citations via these local content managers allows you to concisely manage your local listings across the web.

Reach out to webmasters directly and ask them to update their citations.

Perform outreach to gain new local citations.

8. Hosting location

While hosting location is not a direct SEO ranking factor, it’s important to at least make sure your website is hosted in the same country where you do business in. In fact, IP location has been shown to impact page speed, which in turn can impact your site’s SEO performance. You can use an IP location tool to determine your hosting location.

9. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA), a proprietary metric coined by Moz, aims to predict the “ranking potential” of your website. In an ideal world, the site you are looking to migrate to would have a higher Domain Authority than your current site. The higher the Domain Authority, the more likely you are to appear in the SERPs.

While the formula for calculating Domain Authority is proprietary, we know that backlinks tend to play the biggest role in growing your DA score.

If you are acquiring a site with a DA lower than yours, know that rebuilding this score will be a long-term effort. You can expect to see some movement around the three- to six-month mark; however, it may take up to 12 months, or even longer, to match your site’s previous DA.

This shouldn’t deter you from migrating to a pre-owned site; however, you will need an ongoing SEO strategy over the course of the next 12 months to make sure you are moving the needle.

10. Page speed

Last but not least, one of the most important factors to benchmark prior to any migration is page speed. There are a host of free SEO tools to help you gauge page speed, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Web Page Test, and GTMetrix, for those looking to get extra granular.

While page speed will be influenced by your site’s architecture, if you plan to stay on the same CMS (content management system) as the current domain, ensure that you’re using the most up-to-date version before migrating any content. CMS updates typically include patches for any vulnerabilities –- and many CMSes are constantly optimizing for speed as well.

Final thoughts

Once you’ve completed these 10 checks and resolved any issues, you should feel confident to proceed with your domain migration. Before you begin, there are a few important properties you should make sure are set up correctly so you can start collecting data from the get-go:

Reference link: http://searchengineland.com/buying-a-pre-owned-domain-here-are-10-things-to-check-first-280992