If you own a website, then you, like other website owners, probably want it to be frequently visited by searchers and to receive lots of traffic. For that to happen, your web page must be ranked high by search engines so that it receives more organic clicks.
Search engine positioning is a set of practices that you must do on a regular basis to ensure your web page not only maintains its ranking position but also steadily climbs up the ranking ladder.
Read on to learn more about how search engine positioning works and what you can do to improve your web page’s position. Happy reading!
What is search engine positioning?
Simply put, search engine positioning refers to the practice of optimizing your website’s pages with the aim of getting them to rank higher for related search queries. Search engine positioning isn’t something you do once; it is a continuous process that involves constant analysis and optimizations to rank better. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo use certain algorithms that decide how high your page should be ranked for a particular search.
Search engine positioning centers around a basic keyword. You must optimize your page as best as you can so that it ranks at the very top for that specific keyword. This is important since the pages ranked at the top receive the most organic clicks and thus get more traffic. The higher your page ranks for a particular search query, the more clicks and visits it will get. Ranking lower means you’ll get very few visits since people rarely go as far as the third and fourth page of results to find what they’re looking for.
How does a search engine decide a page’s position?
Now that you know what search engine positioning is, you might be wondering how search engines determine the position of a page for a certain search query. The algorithms these search engines use are quite complex, to say the least. They “crawl” through millions of websites to hunt for relevant information on the search query. Next, these algorithms index or order these pages according to their relevancy. When you search for something on a search engine, the web page results that you can view for your query are those indexed pages. This indexed list is known as SERP, or Search Engine Results Pages.
There are certain factors that determine the rank of a web page on the SERP. Here is a list of some of them:
- keyword usage density
- variations of the keyword and other related topics on the website
- number of quality backlinks to the web page
- geographical location of the searcher
- loading speed and readability of the web page
Search engine positioning vs search engine optimization: what’s the difference?
The relationship between search engine positioning and search engine optimization (SEO) may perhaps be better explained using mathematical diagrams. Is search engine positioning the same as SEO? The answer is yes but hold on. Search engine positioning is actually a subcategory of SEO and thus all search engine positioning practices fall under the umbrella of SEO, but not all SEO practices are about search engine positioning.
SEO encompasses a broad range of practices such as intensive keyword analysis and research and content optimization among other things. One of those practices is search engine positioning, the subject of our article, which focuses on making certain pages rank higher on search engine rankings.
How can you find the search engine position of a page?
If you want to find out the average search engine position of a certain web page, there are numerous tools you can use, with Google Search Console being the most popular one. One thing that you should keep in mind is that the ranking of a particular page for a specific keyword doesn’t stay the same with time. It may rise or fall.
The reasons for a decrease in rank are numerous and range from broken links to content strategies that aren’t effective anymore. In order to maintain your ranking, you should regularly check your web page’s position and take action if you notice the position is falling. Up next, we discuss some techniques you can implement to improve your page’s positioning by search engines. Read on to discover these techniques that you can easily apply to your web pages and improve your digital marketing.
How can you improve your page’s positioning?
Improving your page’s positioning in the search engines is important if you want to get more organic clicks and higher traffic. Check out some tips below to help you with that.
1. Use internal links
Internal links are links that route the user from one page of your website to another one. To use them effectively, add links on high authority pages to the ones that you want to be ranked higher.
2. Analyze and optimize your keywords
Keyword analysis and optimization is important and there are several ways you can do that. First, try to rank more of your pages for one keyword. Secondly, optimize your keyword length and try to rank for longer, more specific keywords.
3. Try changing your content strategies
If you’ve already tried optimizing your content, try changing your content strategies. This may include changing the length of your articles, creating posts that take viewers to exciting gated content, and trying out social media collaborations.
4. Include relevant feature images for your pages
Featured images represent web pages, articles, and posts. Choosing a relevant featured image for your page is important since it is usually the first thing of your page that viewers see for a certain search query.
5. Check for broken links and fix them
Having functional external and internal links on your page is important if you want to maintain its position on search rankings. There are many online tools available such as Sitechecker and Semrush that can help you find and fix broken links.
Conclusion
To sum it up, search engine positioning is really important for every website owner and is a vital skill to master if you want your web page to rank at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages.
