You may be wondering why your website needs to rank high. This is the information age, and customers conduct online research before ordering any product or service. If your website appears among the first few links, then the chances are good that customers will click your link and eventually order from you more often.
In a nutshell, the aim of SEO is getting your website to appear on the first page of search engine results. This is because people usually don't get to the second page before making a decision. Depending on how competitive your niche is, it may be very expensive or very affordable for you to actually get to page one. You may eventually get to the first page if you are patient enough and follow the principles outlined below.
1. Your content should be rich in relevant keywords.
According to app developers, search engines determine ranks of websites with a tool called spiders. This tool crawls the web in an automated manner. The frequency with which spiders crawl your website helps determine how high you will rank, and the spiders rank you on how relevant your content is to your niche.
This is why it's important for you to know the keywords that your customers type on search engines. This will help you develop content around the keywords. For instance, if you offer legal services for injury victims, your prospective clients may be typing keywords like "injury attorney in South Florida." So your content should include all the potential keywords. (At this juncture, it is important to point out that spiders cannot crawl text within an image, so you should ensure that your keywords are not embedded in images.)
Now that you understand the importance of relevant keywords, you might be wondering how to get all the relevant keywords for your niche. All you need is the free Google AdWords tool. This tool will help you identify all the keywords relevant to your niche. You need to ensure that all these keywords appear in your content and the metadata of your page.
2. Linking is important.
The rank of your page is a number from 1 to 10 based on its outbound and inbound links. To improve your rank, make sure all your social media accounts are linked to your website. If a high-ranking site links to your site, it will bring the link juice to your site, thereby raising the rank of your website. You can also try to get listed in free, trusted open directories and professional bodies associated with your niche.
To determine the rank of your website, you may download a plugin like PageRank Status, which works with the Google Chrome browser. Knowing your rank will help you monitor your improvement.
3. Keep your content fresh.
App developers keep the content of their blogs and websites fresh. The rate at which search engine spiders crawl your webpages plays a prominent role in your ranking, and this rate in turn depends on how fresh you keep your content. Each time you upload new content, search engine spiders crawl your site. In addition, your visitors will enjoy reading fresh content.
So, you should always keep your content fresh. Remove old text, images and videos, replacing them with new and more interesting ones. You could set up a blog on your site and update the blog with fresh content every day or every week. It may be difficult initially, but it will become easy when you get used to it.
To stay up to date with current keywords relevant to your site, you can use Google Alerts. It will always update you on the keywords you should develop your content around.
4. Frequently update your SEO techniques.
The rules, principles and algorithms for rankings are not static. They change very often, and you need to be up to date. For instance, website ranking previously depended largely on how you stuffed your content with keywords. Now, there is a limit to the number of times a keyword is allowed to appear in content of a certain number of words. If it appears too often, your content will be flagged as spam and it will lower your rank.
Since Google is the biggest and most famous search engine, app developers take time to study how it works so they can understand the whole idea better.
How does Google work?
Web scraping has become an indispensable activity in every organization because of its numerous benefits. While virtually every company benefits from it, the biggest beneficiary of web scraping is Google.
Google's web scraping tools can be grouped into three major categories:
- Crawlers
- Index
- Search result servers
Google crawlers
Google crawlers, also known as Google bots, scrape content off every page on the web. There are billions of webpages, and hundreds are being hosted every minute, so Google bots have to crawl all webpages as quickly as possible.
These bots run on certain algorithms to determine the sites to crawl and the webpages to scrape. They begin from a list of URLs generated from previous crawling processes. According to their algorithms, these bots detect the links on each page as they crawl and add the links to the list of pages to crawl. While crawling the web, they take note of new and updated sites.
To correct a common misconception, Google bots do not have the ability to rank websites. That is the function of the Google index. Bots are only concerned with accessing webpages within the shortest possible timeline. At the end of their crawling processes, Google bots transfer all the content they gathered from webpages to the Google index.
Google index
The Google index receives all the scraped content from Google bots and uses it to rank the webpages they scraped, based on its algorithm. As mentioned earlier, the Google index ranks websites and sends the ranks to search result servers. Websites with higher ranks for a particular niche appear first in search result pages within that niche. It's as simple as that.
Google search result servers
When a user searches certain keywords, the most relevant webpages are served or returned in order of relevance. Although rank is used to determine the relevancy of a website to searched keywords, it is not the only factor. Each of the links to a page from other sites boosts the rank and relevancy of the page. However, all links are not equal. The most valuable links are the ones received because of the quality of the content on a page.
Before now, a certain keyword appearing more frequently on a webpage boosted the page's rank. It no longer does. What now matters to Google is the quality of the content. Content is meant to be read, and readers are attracted by quality of content, not frequent keyword appearance. So, the most relevant page to each query must have the highest rank and appear first in the results of that query. If not, Google would lose its credibility.