Top 9 Tips for Ranking Your Website on the First Page of Google in 2019

by | Jul 1, 2019 | Blog, Featured

Google Factor Ranking #1: Domain Age

The age of the domain plays quite an important part in determining your domain authority. This in turn can largely determine how your page will rank. Domain age however, doesn’t play a big part in overall Google rankings although it is still important to address every rank influencing factor.

If you have the option and if you know the exact domain you want to continue using moving forward, register your domain as early as you can. That way, when the time for your website to go live, your domain has already been registered on Google for, possibly, several weeks to months.

Google Factor Ranking #2:
Domain Name Keywords Listing

Ensuring that your keywords appear in your domain name used to play a much big factor back in the day in Google search rankings, than it does now.

Having said that, however, it still plays a minor part in your placing, as websites with keywords in their domain often outperform those in the same niche that don’t have them in the domain. Every little but helps!

Google Search Ranking Factor #3:
Keyword Order in the Domain Name

Placing your keywords in a common order that matches how they are searched for in Google does once again, play a part eg: “Ice Cream Shop in Noosa” is possibly what somebody might type into Google. If you have your keywords set out in a similar order to what users are typing into Google, in your domain name – you have got a much better chance of getting ranked versus your domain name being something like “Shop Ice Cream Noosa.”

Google Search Ranking Factor #4: Keyword Appearing in the Sub Domain

Once again having your keyword appear in your sub domain is just as important as having your keywords in your main domain. Both of these strategies have the same effect. We recommend placing your keywords in as many places as possible, in a way that seems natural and not too forced. Making your keyword placement seem organic, is key here.

Google Search Ranking Factor #5:
Public Domain vs. Private Domain

When you register a .com domain you have the option to make it a private listing or a public listing. It has been said that having a private listing does hurt your SEO whilst having your public listing naturally allows Google to pay more attention to it.
We suggest just putting up with the Telemarketing calls that you will inevitably receive when you choose a public listing for your domains – as the benefits to your crawlability far outweigh the privacy aspect.

In the long run, It is better to play it safe with a public domain and deal with a little bit of hassle. Those telemarketing calls you will get barraged with when registering a public domain, do die down after a couple of weeks. As an SEO and web design company, when we register a domain we include our phone number in place of the customers in order to field those calls rather than our the clients.
Every time you register a domain and listing it publicly, you end up getting about 5 to 10 calls from overseas trying to sell you web services.

Google Search Ranking Factor #6:
Domain Country Extension

If you are dealing with international businesses, we suggest that you stick with a .com domain. Although .com is meant to be for the US it has been widely adopted as a global domain.
However, if you are dealing with businesses in Australia only, we suggest using a .com.au domain. This helps Google identify that they need to rank your pages for Australia.
If you are targeting American or New Zealand businesses go with the .com or .nz domain and this will help your website rank for that Geo location.

Google Search Ranking Factor #7:
Title Tag

Having your keyword as the opening phrase in your site title plays a major role in ranking for SEO purposes.
For instance, we’ve set up a website called seoboss.com.au, and if we wanted to make a page targeting Brisbane we would make a page with a similar title: SEO Services Brisbane | SEO BOSS
Google views this favourably as you are listing your service and location as a priority in your listing. Remember Google is all about answering searchers questions.

Google Search Ranking Factor #8:
Heading Tags

Google pays special attention to what’s written on the H1 heading tag and H2 heading tags on individual pages including throughout your whole site.

Although Google places more importance on H1 and secondary importance on H2, H3 also carries some weight but just to a lesser degree. The importance that Google places on H3 heading tag however, is more to do with formatting your content.

Make sure, wherever possible, that you use the exact search phrase in your Heading 1 tag and Heading 2 tags. When we set up pages for websites, we sometimes change the size of the text on the Heading 1 tag so that it will appear as normal size text – but it actually has a keywords tucked in there. Google then sees this as a H1 tag, Google doesn’t really care about the font size, just looks for the H1 tag and give those words extra emphasis.

Doing it this way gives you the opportunity to maximise the benefit of putting your keywords in your heading without looking your page ridiculous with headings all over the page.

Google Search Ranking Factor # 9:
Time On-Page

The time that users the spend on your website on your pages tells Google how relevant your site is for a particular subject.

Let just say someone searches ‘Wedding Dresses Caloundra’ and they find your website which is all about wedding dresses in Caloundra.

Google then takes a look at this kind of traffic and says “well this person hasn’t left this page; this might be the right answer for the question Wedding Dresses Caloundra.” Google will then start to elevate that site and direct more people to that website because it knows that website provides the answer to user’s questions regarding wedding dresses in Caloundra.

If you think of Google as a person that refers people, then you start to get inside the mind of Google and workout on how this search engine thinks.

Try as much as possible to understand the way Google works. We experiences a major shift upwards in our site’s rankings when we started directing our clients to our website for our IT Support company.

We get clients to search our company name and then click on certain links to access our remote support area on our website. In doing this, we kept clients on our page for an extended period of time and pretty soon our rankings started to drastically improve!

Once we experienced consistency with this method, we began to rank our website for other relevant searches.

As a result, our website now ranks for most search terms related to our industry, depending on the competitiveness of the search term.

Try getting users to spend more time on your website. To do this there are a few factors you need to consider:

If you have a gallery of products you can use to keep your visitor on your site, then we suggest using them to keep visitors on your website, browsing beautiful pictures.

Z
Readability – in other words, your site needs to be easy for users to quickly scan, read and choose the paragraphs that they want to read. Don’t use big ugly block of paragraphs. This causes your brain to shut down and say “no more I’m moving on to another website that has a better layout.
d

Keep your paragraphs to four to five sentences per paragraph without adding a new line in between. Doing this, breaks up the content.

i

Make use of optimally sized images here and there – adding images breaks up the content nicely. A web page that has got images and well laid out text will keep readers scrolling down until they find what they are looking for

You can keep a reader on your page for a long time if you’re smart about it. However, it’s preferable not to make our pages too long unless the content requires a long from explanation. Google knows that pages such as “when is Game of thrones on” doesn’t need 1600-word explanation.