How to Improve your Website’s Ranking in Google: Part 1

Read part 1 of this guide for 2 tips designed to help you improve your website's ranking in Google.

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Ramzi Chamat / 8 Ways Media
2016-01-06 09:49:00

 

Google has become incredibly strict over the years with regards to how businesses should operate online and what guidelines they should follow in order to be appropriately found, indexed and ranked. In our highly competitive online world where businesses are all vying for the spotlight, it has never been more essential to follow the rules and maintain proper practices that are suitable, correct and honest.

In the event that a business does not follow the rules or chooses to adopt illicit practices in an attempt to rank higher, the chances are very high that the website will no longer show up on search engine results pages, or worse still will be removed entirely by Google from its index.

Let’s begin with our design and content guidelines:

Text Hyperlinks

A website must be well designed with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page that is featured on your website must be reachable from at least one static text hyperlink. Text hyperlinks, also known as text links, play a very important role throughout your website as they essentially act as ‘highways’ for search engine spiders to travel along and find other documents. With text links, search engines can better understand your website and its interlinking pages.

Although text hyperlinks are important, you shouldn’t overwhelm a single page with too many. Google recommends keeping the number of links on a single page to a reasonable number. But what constitutes a reasonable number? This really depends on the type of website you operate and the size of your website. If you are a small business with a limited number of pages, it’s not recommended to overwhelm a single page with more than 50 links. But if you are a very busy news website with a massive reach, up to 100 links per page is acceptable. However, those links must be of the highest quality, linking to valid resources of excellent information.

XML Sitemap

Your website should also contain a comprehensive Sitemap including links to the important pages of your site. Simply put, a Sitemap lists your website’s pages, thus enabling search engine web crawlers to crawl your website with ease. A Sitemap is essential for any website as it tells Google about the different pages featured on your website that might otherwise be difficult to discover.

When search engine spiders crawl through your site, they could encounter many difficulties discovering some of the hidden pages of your website (for instance, those pages that were written a long time ago and have since become buried beneath the more recent ones). For this reason, a Sitemap is very important in keeping search engines informed about all of the content featured on your site and how often your site is updated.

Google also recommends breaking up a Sitemap into multiple pages in the event that it contains a very large number of links.

When your Sitemap is ready you should submit it to Google in order to get your website’s pages indexed and thus increase traffic to your site. Click here to get submit your Sitemap to Google.  

Please stay tuned for part 2 of this Design and Content guide. 

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