How to protect your search engine ranking
How to protect your search engine ranking
Your website rankings on search engines should be a vital element of your overall website marketing campaign if you want your online shopping website to succeed and stand out from the crowd.
Today, we will look at how you can improve your ranking on major search engines such as Google without falling into unwittingly using fraudulent methods to enhance your order.
Your website’s link popularity is based mainly on the quality of the sites you have connected to by using both inward and outward going links.
Google first pioneered this criterion for assigning website ranking many years ago. Since then, virtually all other search engines like Yahoo and Microsoft, for example, utilize the same principles in one way or the other.
Before we start, however, a little word of warning: Be extremely careful how you go about finding suitable sites to link to, as Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other websites solely to boost link popularity artificially.
So with the above in mind, remember, never connect to any website that has no relevance to your own website’s content. As if you do, you will, like many other sites, lose what link popularity you ever had in the first place.
Another helpful form of practice to adhere to is once you have connected to another website through an external link, go back to that site regularly and ensure that the connection is still active and is not dormant; Once again, if search engines notice you have static websites linking to yours, then you will be penalized.
Before we go any further, it may be worthwhile to see how search engines work.
All search engines follow more or less the same principles. They all search through billions of web pages using search engine bots, more commonly known as spiders, all of them programmed to download web pages to find links, which will connect them to different webpages or websites.
Once the spider has discovered the information it was looking for, it will then enter the data it has found into a structured database called an “index.”
The data contained within this index will include specific vital signals, including the topic of each page, along with the keywords contained within that page; Next, the spider will return and determine the freshness of the page, i.e., when it was last updated and is the content relevant to the website.
Authors note: The previous paragraph should signal just how important it is to only link to sites related to your own.
We have, above, briefly touched on the subject of how important using credible keywords within the content of your website is. However, do not fall into the trap of overstuffing your content with too many keywords, an act which Google calls “Keyword Stuffing’, or improper “keyphrase density.”
Of course, suppose your website falls into the worldwide eCommerce or online retail shopping category. In that case, you want to insert specific keywords about online shopping, keywords such as “Bargains,” online shopping,” “Top Deals,” etc., spring to mind. However, ensure you keep the ratio of your keywords to the actual document down, or the major search engines will accuse you of artificially boosting your page, once again penalizing you for the infraction.
Rule of thumb, try and keep your keywords out of at least half the sentences of your webpage topic, and you will not go far wrong.
The importance of sitemaps
It would seem that these modern-day search engines are so automated that they will, without any help, find your website along with all the pages you have worked so hard on for so long without any further assistance; however, this assumption, an assumption made by so many webmasters is in fact, genuinely wrong.
Yes, these wonders of the modern-day internet still require a little help from us minions, help in the form of a sitemap, much the same as regular retail stores, primarily shopping centers, have at the entrance of all their units. This simple map directs you to the section of the store you are trying to locate.
Simply put, a search engine or google sitemap contains a list of URLs that direct the search engine deep into your website’s interior, where it will find information that it would have typically not been able to see without the aid of the map. If the map is constructed correctly, it will, in turn, help the website to load much faster than without.
Formats for different sitemaps vary; however if you submit a sitemap to Google search engines. Your website is large, so submitting it using an XML format is advisable.
An example of a google XML sitemap URL is the complete website URL followed by /XML.sitemap. It can be submitted using the “Google Search Console” app, previously known as “Google Webmaster Tools.” There is, of course, no cost for this service, so make good use of it.
There are, of course, other things you can do to both protect and improve your search engine rankings. Still, the best advice I can give can be summed up in just one word “Perseverance,” Like most things, it takes time. However, in the end, the pride you feel when seeing your website appearing in front of you on your computer screen after just typing in its name is brilliant and so worthwhile.
Well, folks, I have come to the end of this short narrative, and I thank you all for taking the time to read it. It would also be remiss of me not to thank my hosts BargainBrute.Com, America’s favorite place to shop online, for giving me the platform to write on.
So on behalf of the Vandergraph family and every employee at Bargainbrute.com, we thank you for shopping with us.
