How to improve your Google ranking

There is much written about Google rankings and how to get to the top of the first page, and many people get very confused about how to start.

But there are some very simple things that you can do to your website, without changing how it looks or rewriting it that will provide a boost to your Google rankings.

Title

Each page on your site must have a unique title.

The title should include your keywords for that page. You do not have to put the name of your business in the title except for maybe the home page.

Think of the title like a headline. The only place the title will show up is in the Google search results.

By the way, don’t keyword stuff it, make it so that people will be able to read it and respond to it. The title is listed between the <title>Your Headline Here</title> tags in the head section of the page. The title should be between 6 to 8 words.

Meta Description

Each page on your website should have a unique description.

The description is shown as the next two lines in a Google listing.

If you do not have a meta description or they are all the same, Google will find text throughout the page to put in its listing. That is why you see some strange things in the Google searches.

The description should be no more than 160 characters and have should include your keywords for that page. Do not keyword stuff. It should be written in conjunction with the title to get people to click on your listing.

Note the title and description should be related to what is on the rest of the page.

Treat it like writing a classified ad in your local newspaper.

Lastly, have fun with it. Try different things and see how it works.

By the way, this is only the first stage of optimising your website for search engines, but it is an area where most websites fail.

For more information have a look at Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide for a more comprehensive view by Google themselves.