Three Quick Tips to Help Get on Top of Google

Improving your online presence

Is your website struggling to be found online or your online presence below par?

Many websites despite being visually attractive with a great web design, packed with informative and interesting content can struggle to be found online.

Whilst there are over 200 factors that Google will look at to recognise, understand, index and rank your website there are three simple factors that are often overlooked and easily formatted and adjusted to help your website, rank higher in the SERP (search engine results page) and drive traffic towards it.

URL Structure

A URL or Uniform Resource Locator is readable text that was designed to replace the numbers (IP addresses, e.g., 101.182. 59.77) that computers use to communicate with web servers.

It’s the main text that describes an online document and usually targets keywords present in the content of the web page and helps return relevant pages with Search Engines.

URL Example: https://www.clarkmarketing.com.au/website-hosting/

The URLs on a website say a lot about a site’s architecture and often is considered important for SEO as well as usability.

URLs describe a site or page to visitors and search engines. They should ideally be as descriptive but as brief as possible. By keeping the URL accurate, relevant and compelling helps ranking well with Search Engines.

Keep the URLs clean and fill them with keywords or words that aptly describe the content.

The URLs on a website say a lot about a site’s architecture and often is considered important for SEO as well as usability.

URLs describe a site or page to visitors and search engines. They should ideally be as descriptive but as brief as possible. By keeping the URL accurate, relevant and compelling helps ranking well with Search Engines.

Keep the URLs clean and fill them with keywords or words that aptly describe the content.

URLs Optimisation Checklist:

• Do you have short and clean URLs?
• Do you have keywords in your URLs placed towards the beginning?
• Do you use hyphens in URLs to separate words where necessary for readability? (Hyphens are preferred to underscores)?
• Avoid using special characters in your URLs. Specifically avoid using commas, semicolons, colons, spaces, quotes, etc. in your URLs.

Title Tags

A Title Tag is one of the most important on-page SEO elements on a web page.
It’s the main text that describes an online document and usually targets keywords present in the content of the web page and helps return relevant pages with Search Engines.

Example of Title Tag as seen in Search Engine Results Page

Because Title Tags are an important part of Search Engine Optimisation, here is a checklist to help.

Title Tag Optimisation Checklist:

• Do you have your most important keyword in your Title Tag?
• Do you have the keyword placed towards the beginning of the Title Tag?
• Is your Title Tag within 55 characters with spaces?
• Is your Title Tag content unique?

Description Tags

The Description Tag (also known as Meta Description) is very important for potential visitors to encourage them to visit your web site and is commonly used on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.

Whilst Description Tags are no longer officially a ranking factor, they are extremely important in gaining user click-through.

The Description Tags should use keywords intelligently, but more importantly, create a compelling description that a searcher will want to click. In fact, we call them your Free Google Advert!

The description should optimally be between 150-160 characters with spaces.

Example of a Description Tag as seen in Search Engine Results Page

Description Tag Optimisation Checklist:

• Does your Description Tag contain your targeted keywords?
• Is your Description Tag content between 150-160 characters with spaces? The ideal is 155 characters with spaces.
• Does your Description help users understand better what your web page is about?
• If relevant to your web page does it include a phone number?
• Is your Description Tag content unique?