Rank your Site on Google – a Detailed Guide for Beginners

The popularity of online purchases is constantly growing at a significant rate. This has made brands more web-centric. Now every business is striving to create a better online presence, which has contributed to the basic need of getting online. When we say online, then one of the names that pop up in our mind is Google.

Google has undoubtedly dominated the online market by becoming the biggest search engine of the 21st century. Hence it has become of utmost importance to rank your site on Google, and here’s a guide on doing that.

What is Google Search?

Google has many products under its branch. The only product that we are concerned about is Google Search. So what is it exactly?

Google Search is a search engine that indexes web pages and showcases them when someone performs any query on Google search. In layman’s terms, it is a kind of directory that includes different websites and shows them when someone is actively searching either for the site or regarding their products/services.

It has two types of results, one is organic and the other one is paid. For organic you don’t have to pay anything. Google uses different signals for assessing a website, and later on, ranks it for relevant search queries. Websites that have a good SEO foundation tend to dominate the rankings.

The search also shows paid search results. These results are primarily driven by Google ads to accomplish business goals in a shorter span of time.

Once you rank your site on Google, it will be visible in the search results.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO, a.k.a. Search Engine Optimization is a process of optimizing a website to make it more visible on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and others. SEO can help webmasters/website owners to drive traffic to their website which in turn can increase the sales of their business.

So, how you can rank your site on Google?

1. Research and Analyze your consumer persona

Before writing any content for the website, it is of utmost importantance to understand for whom the content is being written. Make sure to carry out an in-depth analysis of who you want to target with your content. The more data you can collect on your customers, the more effective your SEO will be. 

2. Create the best possible content for your site

Content is the most crucial aspect of SEO and it forms the basis for your SEO strategy. What you want to sell or showcase should be reflected in your content. This means if you are selling smartphones then your content should be focused solely on smartphones.

3. The Keywords

As discussed in the last point, your content should speak about the domain that you are targeting. Keywords or phrases can help you in building the content that works best for your target audience.

Let’s say, you are selling Android smartphones. Your content should mention keywords or phrases that are relevant to android smartphones. For e.g. – buy android smartphone, android phone, affordable android phone, and so on.

Make sure the keywords are added naturally and the content is not stuffed with keywords. Remember, keyword stuffing goes against Google’s quality guidelines so it may affect your search performance negatively.

4. Keyword Repetition

With Google’s inclusion of MUM in its algorithms you don’t have to repeat keywords X number of times. Instead, you need to make sure the content is relevant and unique. However, there are some important places where you can add your keywords, which might be considered by Google while ranking your content. Those are as follows:

1. Meta Title – It is the title that appears on Google search.
2. Meta Description – It appears below the meta title on search results.
3. URL– It is the web address of your webpage.
4. H tags – H tags are your on-page tags that help you in structuring your page content. Hence including keywords in H tags especially in H1 can be helpful for search engines to know about your content.
5. Main content – Main content is the content that is present on the page to help visitors know about your offerings.

5. Content Accessibility

Once you are done posting the content on your page, you have to make sure your page is accessible to Google. For this, you can integrate Google search console with your website to know more about the organic part of your site.

Google search console is a free tool that will help you in diagnosing search issues and may help you in improving your search visibility. Once integrated, you can drop your website’s URL in the URL inspection bar and press enter. The tool will show you whether the page is indexed in Google’s directory or not.

As our page is fairly new, it may not be indexed. In this case, we have to go to the live test and check whether it can be indexed and whether the page is accessible or not.

6. Ask Google to Crawl your URL

If the page is accessible, you can use the request indexing option that is available on the same page where you did the live test. This request doesn’t guarantee indexing, but it adds your webpage’s URL in queuing mechanism from which Google can later pick the URL for crawling or indexing purposes.

Another way to let Google discover your URL is via Sitemap. Sitemap is a file that Google occasionally uses to discover web pages of a website. You can use any free third-party tool to create a sitemap. Once you generate a sitemap, you have to add it to the root directory of your site and later on, submit it in the search console.

Creating a good internal linking structure between your internal pages may help Google in discovering web pages.

7. Wait until your page appears on Google

Once you are done with the above steps, Google may crawl the page. If it thinks your content is good enough to be shown, then it will add your content to Google’s database. This content may then appear on SERP for relevant queries.

So this is how you can rank your content on SERP without much technical knowledge.

Wrapping up

Now that you have been provided with this guide, you should be able to successfully rank your site on Google without any hiccups.