Easy Things to Do for Better Rank

In order to get a web page or complete website ranking, be sure to attend to the obvious- ensure the robots or search engine crawlers can access, read and index the page. Alarmingly simple- yet all too often- we see webmasters with pages marked as ‘no index no follow’. Sometimes the whole site has blocked search engine spiders from accessing it. The most common cause is when a developer puts a no index no follow directive in the php file during development or staging, and forgets to remove it. This directive is not removed when ‘index,follow’ is enabled within a CMS admin setting.

Ensure you have webmaster tools enabled, and that you generate a new sitemap once you’ve made a new page. When search engine crawlers arrive at your website, they check the sitemap. It’s a great way to let them know you’ve created more content.

All your website pages should be accessible via a normal text link from within your website. This means there is at least one more point of entry to the page in addition to any menu bar links. Search engine crawlers are getting much better at parsing javascript used in some fancy navigation bars- however a text link ensures the bot will enter the linked page without hindrance.

Add something to the page that’s on topic and not covered elsewhere. If you are an expert in your field, publishing rank-worthy content, there will always be extra information you can bring to the discussion. Populate your page with digital assets- images, video and a podcast. Host some of the assets on your own server, and perhaps embed a video or two from external hosting services with a link back to your website.

We also recommend adding to, and updating the content within a page. Why do you think news sites rank so well? They have a team of content writers saturating the site with new material. Text, images video- all of these are being added every minute.

If the website maintains a blog, it’s a good idea to publish a link from an existing blog post to the new content, then follow up a week later with a new post also linking to the new page.

Of course it goes without saying- that your on-page search engine optimisation should meet all best-practice criteria.