When it comes to getting Google to love you, you need to pretend that it’s Valentine’s Day all year round. The search engine is notoriously high maintenance. Keeping your top spot for a particular set of keywords is by no means guaranteed. Over time, your position can slip, and you can wind up losing traffic.

So what’s the key to getting Google to love you? How can you stay on Google’s good side and continue to get your pages ranked properly? Check out the following principles.

Google Loves It When You Use These Strategies

Make Your Pages Fast

Google loves fast-loading pages. It wants users to be able to access information the moment that they click your website. Waiting for elements to load is a big no-no and will negatively impact your search engine rankings.

Enhancing page loading speed, therefore, has become something of a priority for business in general. So how do you do this? There are numerous tactics you can use to make your site load faster.

Here are three of the most basic places to start:

• Check the size of all photos and images used on your site.
• Use image compression plugins to decrease the size of site images.
• Embed videos as opposed to uploading images native to your website.

Choose Semantic URLs

The term “semantic URL” might seem hopelessly technical, but it is incredibly easy to understand. A semantic URL is just one where a user can tell what the page is about, only from the address.

Here’s an example of a URL that isn’t semantic:

www.abdefg.com/33445566

And here’s one that is:

www.SEO.com/how-to-get-google-to-love-you

The difference is obvious. Not only does this tell Google what your website and page is about, it also helps users. Keyword-rich URLs are naturally more explanatory and easier to rank. Use the semantic version for all the pages (including blog posts) on your website.

Create Fresh Content

As any SEO analyst will tell you, creating fresh content is critical if you want Google to fall in love with your pages. The search giant is continually looking for signals that your web pages are up-to-date and relevant. It does this by periodically scanning them and then looking for updates. If it detects appropriate changes, it’ll consider this when calculating your rank.

So how do you constantly come up with fresh content on your website? You blog!

Blogging consistently is one of, if not THE easiest way to ensure your website has fresh content flowing through. If you aren’t blogging yet, now is the best time to get started!

High-Quality Links

When it comes to link-building, not all links are the same. Some can catapult your site into first place, while others can actually drag it down.

Building links is the process of finding external websites and then getting them to link to yours. Google then traces through all these and takes them into account when ranking your page. The more links you have, the better – in general.

There are, however, exceptions. You can’t just spam links from spurious sites and assume that Google will take them seriously. In fact, there’s a good chance that the search giant will blacklist your pages. Fake links offer no genuine value to their users.

Focus on high-quality links from reputable, well-known sites. The more popular the website, the more you’ll see your rankings going up.

The Age Of Your Site

This strategy isn’t something that you can necessarily change or control. But it matters to Google, which is why it’s listed here. Google automatically pushes down new websites and elevates older ones. The thinking goes something like this: if a site has been around a long it, it must be providing value.

New sites are a significant unknown for Google. It doesn’t know whether it is offering anything useful or not. For that reason, it is cautious, only boosting rankings after several years.

The earlier you publish and market your web pages, therefore, the sooner you’re likely to see SEO results. Remember that earlier suggestion about fresh content and blogging? Now is the time to get to it!

Ciao,
Miss Kemya