Three Ways to Increase Your Search Engine Ranking: How to Get Better Results

Do you know how well your content is performing? Does your website appear first or second in the search engine results when someone does a search about your initiatives or programs? It’s common to ask how well your content is ranking these days on searches like Google, since Google is the largest search engine in the world. Google’s purpose is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words that were typed into the search bar. Our goal, therefore, is to make it clear to Google what our site/content is about.

Here are three ways we can increase our Google content ranking:

1. Use long-tail keywords in your content to increase your search ranking:
   Long-tail keywords are those three, four or five word phrases in your writing that are likely terms customers use to find information on your topic or initiative. Long-tail keywords are used to target very specific audiences, rather than the masses. They get less search traffic, but will deliver the right content to the right customer--the customer you want to reach. Thus, a higher search engine ranking because very few others will have the information your customers look for.

1. Boost image visibility on Google
   Image optimization is often overlooked when we talk about search engine optimization strategies. Google recently revamped its image search with a brand-new interface and there are new filters, meta data and attribution as well. To take advantage of the new filters make sure your images are marked with the proper meta data--a descriptive filename and use the ALT tag to describe the image very concise. The ALT tag should describe what your image is showing, but not in a spammy way. When used with care images help your reader understand your content and also contribute to a good user experience.
2. Eliminate Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial Content
   Redundant, Outdated, and Trivial (ROT) content diminish the user experience. Redundant or duplicate content is not intentional, for the most part, but it’s out there. Reportedly, 29% of web content is duplicated. Some common ways content is duplicated include: URL variations; or separate site versions with and without the "www" prefix. This is a problem because search engines don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices. And, it can be difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query.
   The fix is a back-end solution your system administrator can implement. If you suspect you have duplicate URLs your administrator can mark them as duplicates by using the rel="canonical" link element--a URL parameter handling tool, or use the 301 redirection mark.
   
   To learn more visit Moz.com for additional methods for dealing with duplicate content and overall search engine best practices.