Semalt SEO: Find Out How To Position Your Website In Google!


Surely you know the following proverb: practice makes perfect. More you engage in SEO, more optimization processes you will learn. Sometimes these processes are so simple that you almost feel ashamed that you have not used them before.

Do you know what I'm talking about?

When I first started with SEO, it all seemed abracadabra. I had not heard before all the terms that came up. This first period I was mainly concerned with reading and understanding the technical terms to get higher in Google. What is CTR? What are the keywords? What are the backlinks? What are 301 errors? You might know what I'm talking about.

Unfortunately, it turns out afterwards that you also have to read a lot of nonsense. Things that turn out, are not true at all or are outdated information that no longer matters.

But sometimes you have only to do a few things to get higher search positions. You should know that there are 3 important pillars:  Visitors, Message, and Reliability. Others talk about Technology, Content, and Authority. These things are a bit similar.

The number of visitors is important to your site, CTR is important, direct traffic is important. The message must match the search, so the intention must match. The reliability depends on the number of qualitative links and also the quality of your website such as technology, structure, etc. Actually, it would fit better within Technology. First of all, you need to find out for which keywords you are already being found.

Pro tip to progress in Google

Of course, it is easier to get higher in Google with the existing pages! Then you have to put the keywords in the most important places on your landing page, where you get the fastest results. (This is mainly for quick wins and not for the maximum SEO optimization process). Online marketing, and especially SEO, is something for the long term! 

URL optimization

Try to use the URL to return the keyword, and use - dashes - between the words, and never use a space. Never put a word together, like mijnwebsite.nl/hoewerktgoogle/

Page title 

In WordPress, you can use an SEO plugin for this such as Yoast, SEOPress, Rankmath, etc.

Page H1 header 

The H1 is the title of the page that a visitor sees at the top of the page. This header often has a larger font than the rest of the page. For example, in WordPress, the H1 is usually automatically the same as the page title. I always recommend setting these separately, and not simply copying the title you gave to the page.

Paragraph text 

This is the content of your page!

Unfortunately, some people believe that the more keywords you place, the better. However, this is not that true! Such a process is called keyword stuffing that can literally kill your site. Though Google is against keyword stuffing, it still works sometimes.

But there is still 1 question left: How do you get these keywords?

The golden honey jar called Google Search Console


If you start with SEO, leading SEO companies, such as Semalt, recommend that you start always by setting up a Google Analytics account and linking your website with Google Search Console.

In Google Search Console you can find all the keywords for which your website is shown in the search results. This is really handy to score higher in Google!

Amazing, right?

You can see within a few clicks which keywords your landing pages are found and on which position those keywords score.

Just go to: https://search.google.com/search-console/performance/search-analytics

Go to Page, and click Page 1

Then go to Searches: here are all the search terms for which your page has been shown. The number of impressions corresponds to the search volume as long as you are on the 1st page in Google.

Here you can see all the keywords that were used when Google had declared that your page was relevant.

In addition to your SEO work, you can also use Google Ads (formerly Google Ad words), so you can find many relevant keywords. The only downside, of course, is the costs involved. You can run ads for 1 month. So choose the most important keywords that you prefer to be found high for that page. The recent posts may have fewer keywords as the number grows with time. The search engines' marketing works better with more data!

With these tips in your head, you can get high in Google without investing hundreds of dollars?

In the rest of this article, you will have all the tips to get a better score on Google.

1. Website Quickscan

Would it be smart to build a house on sand? This well-known Biblical saying has much truth about it. If you want to get good positions in Google you have to start with a good basis. You cannot build a website as leaky as a sinking ship.

Many parties that offer SEO skip this step and immediately start adding the new content.

What a waste!

Do you want to be a step ahead of your competition?

Then first start solving the problems on your website. With an SEO Quickscan, or as I prefer to call it, an SEO analysis, because it is not that 'quick'. You will find on your site problems that can negatively affect the findability.

Here are the 5 most common problems I have encountered. If you have these in order, you have already had 5 steps ahead of the competition.
  1. Check that there are accidentally no pages, No-Index stand.
  2. Investigate whether you are not bothered by the keyword cannibalization.
  3. Check if there are the 404 errors on your site (and if there are the backlinks to the pages that no longer exist)
  4. Your website must work well on mobile, especially the speed!
  5. Have an SSL certificate, and see if all your pages are properly redirected from http to https.

2. Quick Wins with On-Page SEO for higher Google positions

The fastest profit you can achieve is by optimizing the pages that have been on your website for a long time but do not score well.

Check in Google Search Console for which page and keywords you rank 7-10 on average

The optimization of the pages at the bottom of the 1st page can quickly lead to more visitors. So look for the pages for which the most important keyword does not rank high. Optimize this page with new content.

Use PageOptimizer Pro or the free version of SurferSEO to see how you can quickly score for that keyword by looking at the strongest SEO signals: H1, H2, Title, Body text, etc.

With these 2 On-Page SEO tips, you may notice the fastest profit in your SEO marketing!

3. Add the relevant keywords, phrases, and LSI keywords for better findability

If you know what you want to rank for, you can easily get found high in Google and move up higher with a few tricks for many more keywords. Especially when you rank well for an important keyword, Google will automatically associate your page with multiple keywords. This is not the case if you score poorly!

What's important about the relevant and semantic keywords is simply the relevance between these words to the search engines. You can think of the synonyms here, but also you have to look a bit further. You have to take a look at the neighbors over the fence.

What words do they use on their pages? Which words occur with several competitors?

If you don't know exactly what these are, you can also create a free account at SurferSEO or simply refer to Semalt  Full-stack Digital Agency, and have an analysis performed on your keyword. Below the graph, you can click on the Similar Keywords, and there you will get a list of all kinds of keywords that are relevant to your keyword. This is a great start to be more relevant and moving up higher in Google.

You can add these words to your content, but you can also use them as headers! A header has a much stronger signal for a keyword than a word in the content of your page. The optimization of the headers is one of the fastest ways to get higher in Google.

LSI keywords are words that automatically come up in a conversation about the topic. For example, if you talk about a certain type of car, you will also use words such as gasoline, exhaust, rims, etc. These words are not synonyms, but are important for the search engines to understand what the text is about. These benefit your findability.

Extra pro tip 

Wikipedia has a page on your topic; check out the links provided in the text. The example below is about Search Engine Optimization. If you want to get higher in Google, these are the words to add.

You can see that the topic is SEO and that many words have a separate link. These are the topics that are 'connected' to SEO and are therefore relevant/semantic.

See the words: visibility, website traffic, web page, website, backlinks, etc. Use these words in your text to help the search engines to understand your content better and rank high in Google. Finally, you can also use Google Trends to score higher.

4. Concentrate on answering the query, in several ways!

A pro tip I'm going to give you here is one I don't like to give away.

First of all, you should always search Google for that keyword and see which types of search results are shown. For example, think of a YouTube video, Image, Featured Snippet, etc. What you have to do is the following: focus on those things and try to copy them!

SEO for images


If the images are displayed in the search results, also stay concentrated on the images' SEO (Image SEO).

Optimize the file name of the image. So instead of img019.jpg you can make it better: search engine.jpg.

Use a recognizable photo. The tests have shown that the content of an image influences the findability of the page. So if you are using an image of a Ford Mustang, use one that is easily recognizable by a search engine. This can get your website higher on Google.

Add the image to your page surrounded by the topic. If your page is divided into several sections, and 1 of the sections is about a Tesla. Then add the image of a Tesla there.

Use a clear and descriptive Image Alt. This is an alternative text for the image. This is used by the screen readers, for blind people. But an Image Alt is also a ranking factor. Having a well-defined Image Alt can therefore have a positive effect.

Extra tip: It can be useful to process your website in an image with a watermark. As soon as people search, your image may stand out more, and you have a better chance of a click.

Featured snippet


With some searches, you will see a piece of text highlighted at the top of the search results, with an image next to it. This image is often shown on another website. So if you have optimized your images, you have a chance to be featured there.

However, such a piece of text is called a Featured Snippet.

Taking over a featured snippet is not always easy. It depends entirely on the page from which it is now retrieved. But here are a few tips to adopt the Featured Snippet:

So you have to visit the page that is now used as a Featured Snippet. See where the Featured Snippet content is shown on the page.

In many cases, the keyword will appear in a header.

So try to answer the search with a single paragraph of about 40-50 words in your text. Fill this answer with semantic and relevant words.

An extra pro tip

See which words are bold in the search results, and use those words! Keep it secret so you stay ahead of the competition.

YouTube

You will regularly see YouTube videos appearing above the organic search results. This gives you a chance to replace this video with your video.

But how do you exactly do that?

Here are some tips on how to do it.

If no YouTube videos are visible on page 1, please check pages 2-5 to see if there are any. If so, don't worry but focus on a different keyword. If a video or several videos are visible, you should also watch the video on YouTube.
  • Which title does this use?
  • Which description is used?
  • Could the video be used on a website?
  • What keywords does video use?

Conclusion

So, now we are at the end of this article. So you can see that getting your site up in the first Google results will no longer be a mystery to you. Everything you need to do is already mentioned in the article. Just follow these handy tips to get your website up for Google or get in touch with SEO pros.