If you’re planning to go into business, it’s likely that you are planning to have a website. Developing a website takes time, as there are several issues to be considered. You have to decide the face you’re going to present to your audience, your site’s purpose, the right domain, your contact information, establishing your expertise, content, design, site security, mobile-friendliness and ranking in search engines. Given this, you have to work with professional website localization so you’ll be on the right track. SEO or search engine optimization is very dynamic and its best practices are always evolving. Minimize errors by working with a specialist instead of doing it yourself.

Why you need to rank in search engines?

Ranking in different search engines has something to do with SEO. This means that your website should be specially designed and configured to conform to the algorithms of search engines so that your site will appear high on the first search page.

Ranking high ensures your visibility to the people looking for particular information. About one-third of searchers click on the first result that comes up during their search while only 18% click on the second. The list on the first page of a search is usually clicked at least once by 92% of people. Very few click on the second page of the search result.

As an entrepreneur, you know how stiff competition can be and reaching out to your target consumers requires careful study and preparation. If you are invisible in search engines, you are losing traffic to your site, which leads to loss of potential revenue.

Here are some suggestions on how to improve your site’s ranking.

1.    Create great content relevant to your site

High quality content is the top driver of traffic to your site, which greatly helps in your search engine ranking. Make sure that you always have great content for your intended audience. It provides you with a solid reputation and boosts your website’s relevance and authority.

While you provide quality content, you should also remember that you should have fresh content regularly. It’s an indicator for the search engines on the relevancy of your site. Moreover, your content should be original. SEO is strict about originality. There should be no duplicate content. Ensure that your content is not available in other URLs. For one thing, republishing content found on other sites is copyright infringement. It also creates duplicate content that will severely affect your ranking.

Check if your site has duplicate content with some online tools, such as Screaming Frog, SiteLiner or CopyScape. Lastly, although SEO is important, you should always write content specifically for the users.

2. Approach keywords strategically

Keywords remain important in 2017. For a site to rank high in search engines, research should be done on the proper keywords to use. Google’s RankBrain is creating an impact of sites’ ranking. It can understand answers, synonyms, plurals, acronyms and abbreviations. So now fewer derivations of keywords are needed.

SEO has to clarify intent instead of choosing specific keywords. Online marketers have to define their intent using the content that they write and provide their target audience. Likewise, they have to ensure that their content is based on what information users need to find out when they search for a product.

Moreover, cross-channel marketing will be more employed this year. Thus you have to ensure that your website is easily accessible through any type of digital devices and channels. This will have a great impact on SEO’s capacity across the pages of your website.

In the past, keywords are more general in nature, such as “translation.” Now you have to think of how a reader might search, therefore you need specific keyword phrases, like “fast translation,” “French translation” or even “English to German magazine translation.” You need to have a keyword phrase for each of your content pages and repeat that specific phrase a few more times throughout the content.

3. Adjust your internal links and site’s navigation strategically

How search engines determine your page’s importance depends on how well your website’s navigation is structured. This means that a page should be linked often to other pages in your site. Your ranking will be higher the more PageRank flow your site has. Search engines rank pages that answer specific searches. Sometimes, there are pages within your site that will rank high in search results. There are also unimportant pages for search engines despite being relevant to your entire website.

Optimize your PageRank flow, internal link structure and navigation by doing an audit of these elements. Tools like Screaming Frog and SiteLiner are available for this. Carefully read the output so you can pinpoint the pages that are not too important or contain very little content such as the contact page. The SEO specialist can use noindex codes and nofollow codes.

These codes tell Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines not to index pages that are not too important and to not follow the inbound links to pages such as contact pages. In this way, the PageRank flow is preserved and sent to the relevant pages.

4. Improve the speed of your site’s load time

Understand that online readers are impatient. If a site takes time to load, they may not want to wait and just go to the next site that is available. This is a factor that should not be overlooked, as it affects your site’s ranking and your chance to convert casual visitors to actual clients. Slow Internet connection aside, visitors usually abandon a site if it takes more than three seconds to fully load.

Using a website monitoring service will be an added expense but it can help you determine how fast your web pages load, which can identify some codes or images that delay loading time. A variety of tools is available such as AppDynamics, New Relic Browser, Smart

Bear Alert Site, Dynatrace or Pingdom. It also helps if you have a dedicated server.

5. Earn quality backlinks

Inbound links are very important in improving a site’s ranking. While there are still website owners who try to buy links, it is better to earn backlinks naturally. Search engines can easily detect unnatural, manipulative and suspicious links and these can cause your site to fall in the ranking.

How do you get quality backlinks? Submit quality content such as guest blogs, authority articles and informative materials to other relevant websites. More often than not these sites will provide you with reciprocal links – links that point back to your site. However, it is important that you only get links from high quality sites as well.

If you have a new website, make sure that you submit it to relevant search engines so they can index your site. This will make it faster for them to review your site. However, search engines have web crawlers that can find your site in time. It might take a while for you to rank if your site is new. Optimizing your site using the tips outlined here will dramatically improve and speed up the time when you site is up there among sites on a search engine’s first page results. 

Author Bio:

Bernadine Racoma is a senior content writer at Day Translations, a human translation services company. She has notable fondness for things related to technology, social media, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs. She is also an advocate and mother to 7 successful children.