Here are 5 Tactics to Boost Your Website’s Page Rank (SEO)
If you use these tips to enhance your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), you should see a boost in your site’s position in search engine results.
1. Publish Relevant, Authoritative Content
The first rule of search engine optimization (SEO) is to publish material that is both relevant and authoritative. Your site’s authority and relevancy will rise as a result of the increased traffic brought in by your high-quality, user-tailored content. Hone your web writing skills so that you come out as knowledgeable and trustworthy on the subjects you cover.
Keywords
Determine which keyword phrase best describes each page of your website’s authoritative content, and optimise that page for that phrase. Give some thought to the search terms a reader would use to find that page.
Combinations of Several Keywords
Search engine rankings for more than one keyword phrase are quite unlikely, unless the phrases are very close. Both “biomedical engineering jobs” and “biomedical engineering careers” might potentially be optimised for on the same page. If you search for terms like “student affairs” and “dean of students” or “gender discrimination” and “violence reporting processes,” you probably won’t find a single page ranking all of the results.
If you want your website to rank for more than one keyword phrase, you’ll need to create a new page for each phrase.
Inserting Search Terms into your content
Once you’ve settled on a specific term for a given page, ask yourself the following.
Can I utilise the keyword phrase (by employing keywords in folders) as part of the page’s URL?
Can I use a variation of the search term in the title?
Can I use the keyword phrase in full or in part in the headers and subheadings of my pages?
If you can answer yes to these questions, you may see an uptick in your search engine rankings. However, try to sound normal and user-friendly. The phrase “Northern Lights” should not appear in the URL three times in a row, nor should the word “engineering” appear in the page title and headings. Search engine optimization is still not as important as readability and usefulness.
2. Constantly revise your content
While the website’s URL, title, and headers are all important, the content itself is what ultimately determines where a page falls in the SERPs. Use your keyword phrase once or twice in the first and last paragraphs, and another two to four times in the body of the text. Act like a boss. You should strategically link to relevant sources and extra information, both inside your organization’s expansive website and to other websites that provide relevant information.
Use emphasis tags like bold, italics, header tags (particularly H1), and so on to draw attention to these crucial phrases; but, don’t go overboard. It is nevertheless important that your writing sound and feel natural. Don’t ever neglect quality writing in favour of SEO. The most successful websites focus on the reader, not the crawlers. Learn more about search engine optimization for marketing to learn about fresh content possibilities.
As you may have guessed, we have strong opinions on the matter of content. So do web crawlers. Keeping information updated on a regular basis is seen as a key indicator of a site’s usefulness, so make sure to do so. Schedule content audits (say, once per semester) and make necessary changes when you find them.
Blogging
Adding more content to your department’s news blog that is full of keyword phrases is another great way to improve your site’s visibility in search engines. Your blog postings don’t have to be novella-length as long as they are focused on your goals. When you think it will help the reader understand the topic better or provide more context, link to similar CMS pages or blog entries.
Metadata
Metadata is information about the information on your website that can be placed between the head> tags. If your site was built with a content management system (CMS) provided by UMC, all of this information should already be entered for you. Metadata, however, should be reviewed and updated as your site evolves.
Identifying Information in the Title Metadata
Page titles, both at the top of a browser window and as the headline inside search engine results, are generated by the title metadata. Consider it the “hero” of your page’s metadata.
The web development team has created a programme that automatically generates the meta title for each page in your CMS, based on the title of the page itself. Because of this, it’s even more crucial to use keyword-rich page titles.
The textual description that a browser may utilise in your page’s search return is known as description metadata. It’s the site’s “window display,” a brief, enticing summary of the site’s offerings that you hope will entice visitors to explore further. The best meta descriptions use at least two complete phrases. Even if search engines choose not to use your meta description, you should still provide one.
Data Keywords
Metadata based on keywords is rarely, if ever, used to compile search engine rankings. However, you should be familiar with your keyword phrases; including them in the keyword information won’t hurt. You should use a wide variety of expressions. Try to limit yourself to no more than 3-7 phrases, each of which should be no more than 4 words in length. The term “computer science degree” is a perfect illustration.
3. Make your website worth linking to.
Your SEO will improve if other websites link to your page because it is informative, trustworthy, and impartial.
Including pertinent links within the text will increase your credibility and authority. Use the actual name of the location in place of the generic “click here” link. Unlike a keyword-rich anchor which will boost both your own and the linked-to page’s search engine rankings, the generic “Click here” has no value beyond the URL it points to.
Although lately Google starts to weight more the generic anchors and punishes the exact match of keywords as anchors.
Always utilise descriptive links by linking keywords; this helps SEO and provides additional value to your visitors (especially those who use screen readers).
Use alternative text tags images “alt”
Always use alt tags, or alternative text descriptions, to describe your images and videos. It’s essential, especially for people who use text-only browsers or screen readers, because they help search engines find your content.
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