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How to improve the ranking of your websites for search engines
Let’s assume that, you want to promote your dance academy. As the owner of the institution, you want more people to know about the types of dance forms being taught in your institute and the other facilities you are providing. The more people know about your academy, the more students you will get. So, with the help of your friends, you built a nice website to reach a wider spectrum of people in your regions which cannot be possible otherwise.
Finally, you launched your website keeping your fingers crossed to see the response. A month passed, but you couldn’t see any notable response to your site. Disappointedly you look at your search engine results, the numbers are more discouraging. Though initially there were few visitors but gradually the numbers are declining. There might be days when not a single visitor visits your site. You must be wondering, what is the reason behind this downfall?
The million dollar question is, though you believe your site is looking great but does the search engines also thinks like that? Certainly not, the quality of your website may not be touching to that level where the search engine programs can rank it in a better position.
So, in order to get the desired benefits from the search engines, let’s familiar with their working process.
What is a Search Engine?
You may have heard about the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and wondering how they help your site to generate more traffic.
Search engines are nothing but a highly complicated
computer programs built to sort the web pages from tons and tons of web pages across the internet. The first ever search engine program built in the year 1990, called as Archie, was built to display only the file names but couldn’t tell the contents of the pages. Later the like of Google and others comes to the market with extremely sophisticated programs to make our search experience a more useful and beneficial one.
How the Search Engine Works
The search engines are designed in such a way that whenever you search a word or a sentence, the engine pulls out the best matches sites and displays on your result page. The result pages display the links to the websites, images, videos, maps and other related information. The ultimate goal of the search engines is to help the searchers find the best relevant information they are looking for.
How does it affect you?
We discussed the background of search engines and their way of functioning, but how does this information relate you. What is the actual takeaway for you from these discussions?
Well, let’s consider the same case; you owned the dance academy named as ‘Symphony Dance Institute’. So, when somebody searches Symphony Dance Institute, then most probably your site will appear in the list, provided there are not many sites with the same name.
But, when somebody searches only by dance institute, or there are many websites having the same name as Symphony, then your site may not be displayed on the search results page.
Why Search Engines Ignores your site
Before getting into the reasons behind the non-appearance of your websites, let’s first discuss how the search engines choose the websites to display on the search results page. And you will get your answer too.
Basically, the search engines perform three main tasks before displaying the results, they are Crawling, Indexing and Ranking.
Crawling
Crawling is the processes where the search engines look for the related contents the searchers asked for, and check whether the contents are related and allowed to see with required permissions.
Indexing
The second step is to categorize the contents found in the process of crawling. The process of categorization is called indexing. Indexing is the huge list of web pages found by the program by continuously visiting and revisiting related contents.
Ranking
Finally, the search engine programs rank the indexed contents based on the usefulness of the contents as per the searcher’s aspect. Though, the secret behind the ranking
of web pages is known only to the developer who codes the program or the organizations who owns those search engines. But, basically, they use to rank the websites based on their quality contents, the freshness of the contents, related keywords on the pages and many other such criteria.
So, as we discussed the three major processes on how the search engines decide which web pages will appear and what not, let’s find out some of the best practices you need to perform while designing your website. So, that the search engines will pick your web pages while searching for the related contents you are dealing with.
How to get preference in the Search Results
Unique Content descriptions: Always write the fresh and unique contents on your web pages. Never ever do copy and paste the contents found on other website having in the similar business.
For example, you are looking for a designer lamp. There are many vendors available in the market selling the lamp of the same manufacturer. And most of the vendors use same contents about the lamp as provided by the manufacturer
So, when you starts searching for the lamp, the search engines look for the contents having the designer lamp from hundred of web pages. But, the problem arises when the description of the lamp is exactly same on every website, then it is the search engines who decide which website will appear and which are not out of those hundreds of duplicate descriptions. So, it’s better to have the unique description to increase the chances of appearing in the search results.
Descriptive Titles and Texts
Whenever search engines start searching the related contents it looks for the titles of the pages, and only displays the best matching titles for the searcher. So, if your page title is not descriptive then your site may not appear on the search results although your website has similar content.
While searching the contents, the search engines also see the HTML codes of your website. So it is important to have a proper title, descriptive texts in your web pages to make it easier for the search engine to find your site.
Well-defined Image Names
You may have posted very attracting images on your web pages but unfortunately, the search engines won’t see those pictures, they only see the code behind the images, where the name of the images is mentioned.
For example, image-1.jpg doesn’t make sense to the search engines, but if you name it as dance_kathakali.jpg or dance_odishi.jpg, then the search engine can easily read the images.
There are many such options you can use to optimize your websites to appear in the search results. There is also an option to pay a certain amount of money to appear in the paid advertisements sections of the search results.
Always, care for the quality of your web pages with unique and descriptive titles, fresh contents, well-defined images, related videos, and maps to appear on the search results page. After all, the more prominent in the search results get more visitors to your site and in turns converts them to real customers.
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