As the Internet grows at exponential rates, it remains a competition of sorts to keep your blog posts high in search rankings. Google is the most popular search engine out there, and has become the definitive power when it comes to rankings. While the primary goal of your blog posts should be to create/share great content, that is not enough in our competitive world, where millions of blogs are vying for Internet users’ attention. So how can you make sure YOUR blog posts rank to page one on Google? Here are a few tips and tricks for boosting posts up that search engine ladder, to help you land a coveted spot on Google’s first page.
Link Building: External and Internal
To improve your ranking on Google, it is vital to have plenty of valuable links, both internally and externally. This is particular true if you’re focusing on improving the ranks of certain search terms–links should use the keywords you’re hoping to rank higher on. You can easily create these links internally, by linking from your website or from within other blog posts. Linking internally not only improves the way Google indexes your blog, but makes it easier for readers to click through and find other related posts–keeping them browsing longer on your blog.
Externally, you can connect with other like-minded blogs or blogs of those in a similar industry or niche. Making contacts with these bloggers may increase your chances that they will read your blog and link back to it from their own page, giving you a precious external link. Accumulate more of these external links to send your rankings through the roof!
Don’t Forget to Use Google+
In the vast world of social media platforms, Google+ is often pushed to the wayside. But Google+ is an integral part of the Google empire. Actively sharing your blog posts via this network is an excellent way to get your post shared on a platform which is closely connected to the search engine itself. Your rankings can highly benefit in this way, especially if the post is shared multiple times via other Google+ users.
Titles are of Great Importance
It may come as a surprise that your blog post titles can work hugely to your advantage with improving Google rankings. The title of your page functions as a meta tag—something which is not visible to readers but is used by Google in their complicated algorithms to rank pages. One secret is that a better title will improve your rankings. What makes a better title? For Google, put the important words at the beginning of the title, as this has been proven to be more effective for higher rankings. As an example, instead of a blog post title such as “How to Travel the World on a Budget”, you might opt for a two part title like: “Budget Travel: Seeing the World for Less.” This puts the keywords of your post right at the beginning, improving search engine rankings for your blog post in Google. This would help your post get to page one by focussing on “budget travel” as the important search terms. To harken back to the earlier point about link building, you could then boost this post through related web posts by linking to the budget travel post internally within the other blogs. What words would you use to link? Budget travel.
With an investment in learning these types of principles, it will be a breeze to get your blog posts to page one of Google. It definitely takes time and effort, but the tips and tricks above will put you one step closer to your goal.
