Find out how to rank higher on Google and what to do if your traffic drops in any updates.
Everyone knows the importance of providing consistent, high-quality content on their website, but determining what quality content looks like can be a little tricky.
Why?
We know that quality is subjective, of course, and while one person might enjoy a particular style of content, another might find it not relevant enough or just plain uninspiring.
So in this scenario, you have Google. The holy grail of search engines and traffic for websites that aim for sales and lead generation. Everyone wants their content to rank highly on a site that gets over 63,000 searches per second.
By the way, that’s about two trillion searches a year.
With the amount of content available increasing by the second, how can you ensure your content ranks above the competition?
Let’s first look at how Google rates the quality of your content, as this is a key step in helping to understand how to create high-ranking content.
How Google evaluates the quality of your content
Google doesn’t rank content to make your life harder, even though it sometimes feels like it. They rate content because they want to provide their users with the best answers or solutions to their queries. It matters to your users, and therefore it matters to them.
That’s why Google has a set of search quality guidelines to try and help people create high-quality, relevant content that will be beneficial to their users.
So let’s take a look at how Google evaluates the quality of your content.
indexed content
The process of getting your page displayed in search engine results is called indexing. If you don’t index your page on Google, it won’t appear in your search engine results. However, when you successfully index your content, you automatically get more traffic and any new content you publish is discovered much faster.
Therefore, it is vital that you follow the indexing strategies below to ensure that Google grades your content:
- Make sure your most important pages are all indexed.
- Review the index using the google site:url tag to be searched and eliminate irrelevant pages, weak content, or parameter URLs.
- Review the cache of your key pages using cache: url and check if a Googlebot has recently entered your site and discovered your most recent content.
- Review the content itself.
content size
The ongoing, never-ending debate – how long should quality content be?
You could ask 100 SEO experts and they would probably all give a different answer. Some believe that longer content directly correlates to higher search rankings. While others believe that short and to the point better suits the short attention spans of today’s users.
However, it’s what Google thinks really matters, and they’ve been very clear about how they feel about the importance (or lack thereof) when it comes to word count when evaluating quality content.
In fact, John Mueller, webmaster trends analyst at Google, revealed in August 2019 that ‘word count is not a ranking factor’.
Also, Google’s quality raters don’t even count every word in every piece of content, so why are you even bothering?
Enough quantity to meet user’s need
This is arguably the most important element in ensuring that Google ranks your content at the top. They are looking for the content that provides the most outstanding solution to their users’ queries.
If you provide the best answer for users, Google will rank you at the top. It’s really very simple.
How do you ensure your content offers the best solution?
- Ensure your content is authoritative, credible, and offers a high level of awareness.
- Use references from official and reliable websites.
- Link your content to official and trustworthy websites.
- Make sure your content is well-researched.
Top Techniques to Reverse a Google Penalty
A Google penalty is a punishment against a website whose content is contrary to the marketing practices imposed by Google. If you get a penalty from Google, you will immediately notice a significant drop in your website traffic.
There are two easy ways to find out if you’ve been penalized by Google:
- Via Google Search Console: This is where Google communicates with webmasters about potential issues with their sites.
- Checking your Google Analytics traffic reports: Just log into Google Analytics and check if there was a drop in traffic around the same time that Google released an algorithm change. If so, you probably got a penalty.
A Google penalty can have an extremely negative effect on your site, sending it down in search results. Fortunately, there are ways you can reverse a Google penalty and restore your organic search traffic.
Run a backlink audit
Having harmful or dangerous links in your content is a big problem for Google and almost always results in a penalty. Therefore, it is vital that you run a backlink audit to remove all spam links.
It is also recommended to remove all links to:
- Sites that have been penalized by Google
- Sites not related to your niche
- Sites with spam comments or forum profiles
- advertisers
- Adult sites, games or loans
- Non-existent backlinks and site-wide backlinks
Run a content audit
Even if you think you’re creating high-quality content, that doesn’t mean it’s effective content. You could be missing out on invaluable keywords, not providing enough information to answer user queries, or your content simply cannot be formatted in the most productive way.
That’s why it’s so important to perform a content audit, and even more so if you’ve been penalized by Google. Here’s how you’ll do it:
- Generate a list of all your content that has been indexed by Google. This can be done using Link Kipper , a Google Chrome extension that will allow you to extract all the links on a web page and export them to a file.
- After exporting multiple files, you have to merge them into one.
- Now you can review your content and make any necessary changes.
Your content changes may include:
- ‘Noindex’ any bad content (content with little or no value)
- Rewrite any low value pages
- Implement permanent (301) redirects to the most relevant pages
- Remove pages that are no longer needed
Content and metadata work in partnership
While not visual on the page, make sure your content audit includes your pages’ metadata.
Page titles are a crucial factor in a user’s decision to visit your site in the first place.
Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes, evaluate your page titles:
Are they effective? Do they attract the reader? Do they accurately convey the content of the content?
If not, make the appropriate changes to ensure your content is as engaging as possible.
Siteliner is an incredibly useful tool for auditing your content as it identifies any duplicate content, broken links or redirects.
Perform SEO review
If SEO isn’t already one of your top priorities when it comes to your content, you need to make it ASAP. However, this is not a simple task as Google is constantly changing and updating its algorithms to ensure that the pages they present are safe, fast and easy to use for their users.
Therefore, it is very important that you can adapt to new SEO tactics, and one of the simplest ways to stay current and avoid Google penalties is to perform a technical SEO website audit.
Elements you should consider when performing an SEO website review include:
- The hierarchy of your pages: Your content should be clearly structured so that it’s easier for Google to analyze your site and index it for search.
- Check if the site is crawlable: You can do this by checking your robots.txt file, as this is the first port of call for any web crawling software.
- Make sure your site is indexable: The easiest way to do this is by using the site: Google search parameter on the domain.
- Review your sitemap: Your XML sitemap is a map of your site for Google and is very important as it helps crawlers find and rank your pages. You must ensure that your map is formatted correctly, follows the sitemap XML protocol, and includes all new pages when creating them.
- Correct errors identified by status codes.
- Check all internal links.
- Evaluate your semantic HTML.
- Identify any AMP issues: Users rank speed high on their priority list, and so does Google.
- Identify any image performance issues that could be impacting your SEO.
- Identify any caching, prefetching, or preloading issues.
- Check the use of structured data.
It can also be extremely helpful to perform a competitive SEO analysis to ensure you are always one step ahead of the competition.
- Identify your SEO competitors
- Assess the overall dominance strength of your competitors
- Look for new keyword opportunities
- Analyze the content on the website
- View backlink profiles
- Examine the UX of your websites
The key to consistently ranking on Google is to never rest on your laurels.
User needs are constantly changing. Google algorithms are constantly being updated. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are continually working to improve and revise your website and the content posted on it.
If you do, Google will reward you.
Original Article from: https://tableless.com.br/site-tableless-estatico/