SEO: How to Optimise your Website to Drive Traffic and Increase your Domain Rating (PART ONE)
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways to increase website traffic for free, or at least at a fraction of the cost of paying for online advertisements which can be pretty costly.
Organic traffic refers to those visiting a website through means that aren’t paid for, and the best way to improve your organic traffic is by increasing your domain rating, which is what Google and other search engines use to rank your website on their search results pages (SERP).
Increasing this rating will cause an uptick in the amount of traffic passing through your website, in particular, repeat traffic, which ultimately leads to an increase in the number of conversions — visitors interacting with your website how you intend them to (buying, clicking, signing up, etc.).
But how do you increase your domain rating? Well, this two-part guide will explain all you need to know!
How do Search Engines Work?
Search engines send spiders — no, not actual eight-legged creepy-crawlies — across the internet to find and read the code of every single web page that’s online, which is a lot of reading… In 2014, JJ Rosen reporting for The Tennessean said there were over 35 trillion web pages in Google’s indexes.
When a web page has been crawled by one of these spiders, they are placed in an index, alongside every other crawled web page. Think of these indexes as gigantic libraries full of web pages instead of books.
Once you search for something, the search engine enters the indexes and pulls all of the pages which match the searched term or query, which you are then presented as results. These results are available to you so quickly because the pages have already been indexed by the spiders, hence seeing ‘about 2,990,000,000 results within 0.47 seconds’ when searching for “football” (yes, I looked).
Now, the pages at the top of search results are the pages which have a strong domain rating, which is why you see them at the top of the search results. Similarly, but at the other end of the scale, the results you find on page 21 (wait, page numbers go that low? Yes. I looked. Again.) have a lower domain rating.
Be careful though, some search results show two or even three advertisements at the top of the SERP which aren’t there based on their domain rating. These can be easily identified, however, by looking for “Ad” next to the search result.
Authority, Relevancy, and Quality
If you were only to take one section away from reading this two-part article, this is that section.
Authority, relevancy, and quality are the underlying pillars of SEO, and understanding these sets you up best for adapting your strategy to help you climb the rankings on SERPs.
Authority is how a web page is viewed as important by a search engine in relation to a searched query.
If a search engine views a particular page as more important, sometimes referred to as having more weight, then the search engine will push this page further up the SERP.
The reason behind the search engines doing this is because they want to provide users with a seamless experience as their way of attracting repeat users.
So a web page which provides accurate information that answers searched queries regularly will be pushed towards the start of the results to best provide this experience on the search engine.
A strong web page from you is just as crucial to Google, as it is to you.
As well as producing accurate and informative content, having high-quality backlinks to your web page is one of the most important ways to increase authority, but more on that in part two.
Relevancy is pretty straightforward. Does the searched query match what your web page is offering?
If you have a web page about shoes and Google views that page as highly authoritative in the shoe world, then this page is highly relevant when somebody searches for shoes, which means your web page will rank higher on SERPs.
However, Google is not going to view this page as authoritative for someone searching for a new trampoline because these two don’t have any relevance to one another.
Make sure your web page is relevant to one niche only and you will start improving your SEO without much effort at all.
Quality is the standard of the content which you put on your web pages.
This may seem obvious, and I get what you mean. I wouldn’t want to publish anything which I believe to be lacking quality. Quality content, though, can make your web pages relevant, and authoritative, and you’ve just read about the importance of those.
In short, quality content offers a number of benefits towards your domain rating.
Firstly, quality content increases your CTR (click-through rate), or the number of people clicking on your web page, which Google’s algorithm LOVES to see when ranking web pages.
Secondly, quality content is more likely to get you more backlinks from other highly authoritative websites, another element Google loves to rank you on. The more backlinks you have, the more authoritative you are viewed as, and your content is seen as being of higher quality.
Next, you can ensure keywords are present with quality content. This doesn’t mean you should produce content focused on including keywords, though. You still should produce your content with your target audience in mind, but don’t be afraid to use keywords where possible, as this all adds to improving the quality of your content.
Don’t overdo the keywords though, as part two explains.
Content also refers to the interaction with your website as a whole, not just the words, images, or media that you physically produce.
The backlinks to your site may be great, likewise your blog and use of keywords, but if your website is slow, not optimised for mobile, and is a poor user experience in general, then your bounce rate — the number of people entering and quickly leaving your web page — is going to increase and your domain rating decrease as a result.
In order to make sure your website is optimised for search engines, understanding the basic principles of how search engines work, and how a website is ranked, is very important.
Everything that part two explains relates heavily to the pillars of SEO: authority, relevancy, and quality, so make sure you understand these aspects before trying to optimise your own site.
Click here to read part two of how to optimise your website and improve your domain rating.
Contact SALVé to learn more about how you can optimise your website.
