You’ve Got a High Search Engine Ranking – Now What?

At last, your search engine optimization efforts have paid off and you’ve scored that coveted high ranking in the major search engines.  But the battle for the top isn’t over yet.  Here’s how to maintain your high ranking – and what to do if your site suddenly falls or disappears from the search engine.

First, have your web designer (or you can do it yourself if you’re willing to invest some time and effort) make the following internal tweaks to your site. 

All of these changes and additions will help the search engines index your site around your targeted keywords and bring in more of your ideal customers.

• Rename your pages – Search engines love relevant, keyword-rich content.  So if you’re a New York City dog walker, rather than naming your page about_me.html, name it aboutme-newyorkcity-dog-walker.html. 

It might seem unusual to do this at first, but if someone is searching Google for “new york city dog walker” – which page do you think will come up first or near the top? Your “About Me” page!

• Rename your images – Even images play a role in how your site is indexed. If you notice your rank slipping, rename your images, again to something keyword-rich.  So instead of myphoto.jpg, you might rename it to nyc-dog-walker.jpg, again using relevant keywords in your file name.

• Change your title and meta tags – The title of your page can affect your ranking – especially if it’s something as “stale” as “Welcome to XYZ Homepage” or just “Company Name”. 

Unless you’ve got the branding and marketing budget of an instantly-recognizable name like Coca-Cola, add some relevant keywords and phrases into your title and meta tags – including the meta keywords and description, which appear in your site’s source code and not on your site itself.

• Update your <alt> tags – Alt (short for alternate) tags are phrases used to identify an image.  Generally these are used for web accessibility and help screen readers “read” your page to the blind or visually impaired. 

But search engines read these tags too.  With that in mind, your alt tags should appear on each image and should accurately describe it using your main keywords or phrases. 

Whatever you do, don’t “stuff” an image with the same keywords or phrases over and over.  That’s a red flag that could kill that high ranking you’ve worked so hard to achieve!

Going back to our New York City Dog Walker example, if you have a picture of yourself walking a happy throng of dogs, don’t put in alt text like “dogs” or even “walking dogs”.  Add some more description – even a sentence such as “Dog walking services in New York City”

• Add links within your site – You want to make it as easy as possible for the search engines to navigate your site, so don’t forget to link to your own pages internally.

Ideally this is done on the top or left side of the page as your overall site navigation, but also at the bottom of each page as well.  You can also create a “Site Map” that is one of the first files a search engine looks for that makes it easy to find everything on your site.

By keeping these suggestions in mind, you’ll be able to hone your search engine ranking with ease and ratchet your site above your competitors who may not know these tips and tweaks. 

If you’d like more help with improving your search engine ranking, why not get a free quote from iElectrify and learn more about our SEO copywriting and search engine friendly web design services?

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