SEO Part 2- How to Get Your Website Ranked on Google

January 26, 2021
by arielknowsnothing
7 min read
54 Comments

If you want your website to exist inside the metaphorical “internet forest”, then it better be available when you search for it on Google.

As mentioned in my previous SEO post, organic search results are critical for any website. You can get better organic search results for your site is if it is recognized by Google.  

How Do You Get Google to Recognize Your Site?

Google, thankfully, is very good at recognizing things. According to Google, a way to check is to type in “site: (insert website here)” into the google search. If a result appears, you are recognized. Here’s what happens when you do it for my site right now:

My site is not perfect yet, but I will get to how to improve the headings later in this post.

Why Your Site Is Not Recognized

Google hasn’t recognized/ indexed your website.

Google can take a week or potentially more to update its search results. If your website is new and bare it will be more difficult for it to do. If it’s still not recognized, you can setup an account with Google Console. Or, you can try to manually tell Google that you have a website and submit your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) to Google directly- here.

Your website also may not have index tags. Meaning, there is no code available for Google to read your website, or the code has been hidden from Google. Sneaky!

Additionally, your site may not be optimized for Google to crawl through your site.

Keywords, keywords, keywords!

Keywords could also be a factor. If there is too much competition in the keyword space, your ranking could be very low and therefore irrelevant. Websites compete in terms of relevance with the highest sites ranking at the top of Google’s search results and the lowest at the bottom.

Google can also remove websites from their search results if they feel that a website doesn’t meet their quality guidelines or if the website is breaking the law. Considering the amount of gross and illegal things you can find on the internet, it seems like this would be a rather unlikely problem for most.

Neil Patel’s blog does a really deep dive if you want a lot more details on this. Additionally, SEO Mechanic does a shallower dive but it’s easier to understand.

Once Google recognizes your site, how do you build organic traffic?

First, you need to go to Whole Foods!  

Next you should find what is being searched for around your site topic on Google.

A good way to check is to type in questions around the topic of your website and see what Google recommends in the search bar.

You need to find your target audience/ which people you want to reach. For example, if you’re a boxing gym in San Diego, such as GOLO Boxing, then it’s important to focus on people in San Diego.

You should provide what they’re looking for. For example, users looking for a boxing gym want to find one that is close, fits their workout style, and comes highly recommended.

If your website’s content properly answers the user’s question, Google will reward you.

A great way to do this is provide the answers on your site. For example, creating a blog post about the best boxing gyms in San Diego; making a list specifically, and linking to the gyms. This provides quality information for the searcher and is easy content to create.

Make Your Site Look Good

After you’ve created good content, the next phase would be to make your site look good when you search for it on the Google search results.

The best way to do this is to change the permalink name settings.

Permalink

Wait, what is a permalink?

A permalink is a permanent hyperlink to a particular webpage or blog entry. So, for this blog post the permalink is: https://arielknowsnothing.com/seo-part-2-how-to-get-your-website-ranked-on-google/

A hyperlink is a word or phrase that you can click on to jump to a new document or section when reading a webpage. Wikipedia is the king of this.

As you can see above and below, I have already included hyperlinks to business pages and other blogs. I use the hyperlinks to make it easier for you to find the webpages.

I believe each website building platform allows you to change your permalink settings. Because this is a WordPress.org account, I will tell you how I do it in WordPress.

Go to the dashboard, click settings, then change it from plain to post name and it will set up the posts automatically to what you titled.

Doing this is not only better for the reader, but it is also better for Google because it gives it a clearer understanding of what the post is about, which is great for SEO.

Webpage Description

Each website post has a description on Google. Basically, what is under the website so the reader will know what to expect before they click on it.

You should customize the description. This is better for SEO and also for the searchers themselves because they can get a better idea of what type of content they are going to see before they click.

I don’t know about you but clicking a website you searched for and not getting the result you’re looking for can be a big problem. Maybe you’ve even been Rick rolled before. I know I have.

A way to customize your description in WordPress is to add a plugin.

The one I use on Word Press is called Yoast SEO. Again, not sponsored.

How to Use Yoast SEO

Scroll to the bottom of the page to add a description. It will show you how the description will look on Google on both desktop and mobile. Yoast also comes with other features and gives more advanced SEO advice. It will scan your posts and tell you if they are optimized for SEO, and if they’re not, how to improve.

Yoast’s SEO optimization improvement recommendations focus on the important stuff, like: keywords, post length, and minimizing passive voice.

As far as descriptions go, they should be like a tweet, short, and to the point. (Gosh I really want to make a political joke here, but… probably not the best idea.)

If you want good examples ask Google questions and read through the top descriptions to get ideas. Here is a great example:

Your next step is to tell Google about the type of content you display on your site. Because my answer to how I do this is more WordPress driven, I will link to Website Learners. Again not sponsored, they just have great content.

Final Thoughts

While SEO is critical for gaining organic traffic, content is most important. If your content is not valuable or if it shows something different from what the reader thinks it will, the ranking will drop, even if it is optimized for keywords and SEO.

Your site can be dropped in a lot of ways, many of which are technical. You can learn more about the ways here.

Quality content is critical. Even if you have the right keywords and do the proper descriptions, if the actual quality of the content is bad, Google will quickly learn and drop your ranking.

Creating reliable content that is about what you say it’s about is extremely important, especially online, but also in other forms. For example, if you pick up a Twilight book thinking it’s a YA novel about teenage vampires and werewolves, but it’s actually about resident surgeons in Seattle, you’d probably be confused. Therefore you must use proper titling and descriptions to let your visitors what to expect.

I will create more posts about SEO in the future, but for now this one and part 1 should give you a great start. I’ve also linked to other pages that go a lot deeper into it to help you learn more.

I’ve also found sometimes’s it’s best to learn directly from the source.

Here is a starter guide from Google.

All the best,

Ariel

About the author

arielknowsnothing

View all posts

54 Comments