How to make your website rank on google 🔍

#seo #google #webdev

Introduction

If you run a business or a brand, you know how important it is for you to be reached by more and more people. If you have a website, SEO can help you reach more and more people through Google search results. The better you rank on Google, the more sales you can generate. There are some good ways for you to rank properly on Google. Let's look at some ways to do that.

Getting your website indexed

Before getting into how to rank your website well, the website needs to first be indexed by google. So your question might be HOW? Open google and search for site:yourdomain. For example site:avneesh.tech. If your website shows up great!

If it doesn't go to Google Search Console and create a new property.

It will ask you to verify your ownership so add the necessary txt records

Finally, search for the domain in the search bar on top and you will reach a page similar to this

Click on request indexing then you need to wait for a few hours maybe even a day.

Optimising your website to rank well

Now that our website is on Google, let's see how to get on the first page and maybe even get number 1!

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is a tool that can be used to measure various aspects of a website like performance, Accessibility, Best practices, SEO, etc.

So, go to your website hit inspect and go to the lighthouse tab. Click on Analyze page load and wait for lighthouse to generate your report

Once the report is generated go through the report and see why you have got the score you got and then try and improve all those aspects. The goal here is to get all 100. A few common issues that are here-

not proper SEO tags (see next section)
links without a description
no img alts

Head and Meta tags

There are a lot of tags that you can use to improve your SEO like title, meta description, robots, canonical, viewport, open graph, social media, etc. If you are using next.js, have a look at Next SEO to manage these tags in a better way, more about it here.

Semantic HTML

Organising your HTML tags importantly is also super important, like the heading tags (h1, h2, h3...), p tags are really important. And don't use a button as a link and a p tag as a button. It will hurt the accessibility of your site!

Responsive

You might think that this isn't an important point but this actually is! If your website is responsive it has a higher chance of getting ranked higher than a site which is not.

Sitemap

A sitemap.xml file will define the different pages on your route and will help all the pages come up on google for different keywords instead of just the home page! This is very useful for blogs

RSS Feed

If you have a site that is related to content like a blog or a podcast which has tons of pages it is great to have an rss feed with all of the pages linked in there.