As a website publisher, one of your main worries is most likely keeping your site on Google’s good side. Having great Google rankings goes hand in hand with applying good practices in order to promote an excellent online brand reputation, which will keep your site’s content easily found on search engines. Also, it is important to make sure that you abide by Google’s rules so that you don’t end up being punished by its algorithms, or even worse, blocked! There are many ways to make sure you follow the rules in order to keep out of trouble, and most of them boil down to the relevance, compliance and quality of your site’s content, including the content on your ad zones. On Today’s blog we tell you 9 top tips to optimize google rankings on your website.
#1 Top tips to optimize google rankings: Publish authoritative content
The first one of the main tips to optimize google rankings is that whatever your topic or product is, content that is authoritative and high quality is the main driver of your Google rankings, and not only that, it promotes your brand’s reputation – Everybody likes visiting a website that offers great content! This content needs to be interesting and created especially for your end user. This will not only increase site traffic, but will also improve your website’s authority and relevance. For instance, if you have a gaming site, make sure that all of your content appeals to this topic, or also other topics that are relevant to gamers: A lot of gamers enjoy fantasy related content, so you could write a blog about the best fantasy series or fantasy related games of 2023.
Are you selling your traffic in order to increase your site’s revenues? Then this rule also applies to your ad zones: Work with a reputable ad network which gives you full control over what verticals you enable on your ad zones – Your ads also need to stay consistent with your site’s content!
#2 Update your content regularly to stay relevant
You have a website with great content designed to captivate your audience. The next step is to keep it always fresh and updated so that Google recognizes it as relevant at all times. So the second of our 9 tips to optimize google rankings is to regularly create new content such as blogs, content guides or other editorial content. If you have a dating site, you could write something like ‘5 tips to have a great first date’, for instance, or interesting topics ‘3 reasons to take care of your body’, if your site is all about nutrition and lifestyle, and similar. You could also run promotions if you are offering services or products to your end users, as well as explaining how to best use your offerings, organize online events, and optimize your SEO regularly.
#3 Apply Great SEO Practices
SEO is a powerful tool when it comes to making online content rank. The principle is simple: Choose your preferred keywords based on your site’s focus topic or vertical, make sure that they are present on your site’s content, and keep adding new content that features said keywords. Aside from your main topic focus keyword, you will most likely have other subtopics or features that will require secondary, more specific keywords. For instance, if your page is about health products in the US, your main keyword could be something like ‘health products in America’. However, if one of your products is a nutrition supplement to increase focus, then the keywords for the page featuring this product could be something along the lines of ‘healthy focus supplements’, ‘brain power supplement, or even ‘what supplement should I take to increase focus and performance’, if you want to use a longtail keyword to write a ‘tips’ blog article.
Remember: In this day and age, keyword stuffing will be detected by Google instantly, so another one of our tips to optimize google rankings, would be to avoid that altogether. Instead, make sure to use all of your site’s keyword tools such as Metadata and Meta Tags, Alt tags, Optimizing your tech SEO, link building, and similar. If you are using WordPress, don’t forget to use the YOAST plugin to help you make informed SEO decisions over your content.
#4 Internal linking strategy and link quality
Your site’s internal links are another instrumental part of your SEO strategy: An internal link is any link from your site that connects one of your pages to another, and both the end user and Google will use them to navigate your content in order to find useful information. By adding useful internal links within your website, you can guide your audience to the most important content, and also help Google to establish a hierarchy and structure of your site.
Now, let’s look at the links themselves: Link quality is also extremely important. Creating SEO-friendly links that are simple in structure and not too long will have a positive impact on your rankings, and in turn affects how the content on your website should be structured: If the pages on your website are organized logically, so will the structure of your links.
Here are a few best practices to create your site’s links:
– Keep them short and concise
– Include the keywords in your SEO strategy
– Remove numbers and unnecessary information
– Include subdomains for logical structure
– Everything needs to be lowercase
– Describe your content with the words in your links
– Use hyphens to separate words
#5 Create a great backlinking strategy
A great backlinking strategy is another key aspect of increasing your Google rankings and building authority. Basically, when your website is linked to other reputable sites, it tells search engine algorithms that your site is worth being linked to, and it most likely offers good quality content that is legit and reputable. Remember: These links need to lead to other legit websites that Google has also ranked as high quality and trustworthy. They also need to be relevant to your industry or content in some way, so for instance if you have a gaming site, you could link back to other well-known gaming platforms that you collaborate with. Equally, if you are writing about dating tendencies, you could link back to a Wikipedia article on dating and romantic relationships goals changing throughout history.
#6 Achieve optimum website performance
Yet another one of the most important tips to optimize google rankings: When it comes to successful websites with a healthy traffic flow and a high Google ranking, a great user experience is key: Nobody enjoys a slow-loading website with images that aren’t responsive or don’t load properly. And Google ranks down websites that present these and other user experience issues, prioritizing results that load fast and have visual stability and interactivity. So, in order to avoid issues that impact your UX metrics, it is important to check your site’s Core Web Vitals regularly. Here are a few tools that you can use to track the main ones:
– GTmetrix
Once again, this affects your ads too: By reducing the maximum size for ad creatives your website will load faster, which will also positively affect your end users’ experience and Google rankings. more on that below:
#7 Keep your ads IAB and Google compliant at all times!
Always, always, always keep your ad zones compliant according to Industry standards! The IAB Standards are a series of guidelines put in place by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), designed to support a healthy and sustainable online advertising industry, to curate a safe and pleasant browsing experience for the end user and promote the growth and health of the online advertising industry. This includes anything from ad weight and loading times to online safety, so it is also one of the top tips to optimize google rankings, as well as the responsibility of advertisers, publishers and ad networks to abide by these rules and keep up-to-date with best practices and new regulations. Abiding by these standards also have huge benefits for website publishers, besides obtaining great Google rankings, including:
– Great site reputation: It is key for publishers to display ads that are high quality on their website to ensure a good ad experience for the end users, which is paramount for their site’s reputation and users returning to visit is.
– Increased revenues: The more clicks and the higher the CTRs that these ads get, the higher the value of their site’s ad zones will have, which will impact positively the publisher’s revenues.
#8 Work with reputable partners that always keep compliancy in mind
The main way to avoid issues with Google if you are promoting ads on your site is to always work with an ad network which has policies and infrastructure in place to also keep compliant with Google, the aforementioned IAB, and also the Coalition for Better Ads. Ad Nation’s Compliance Team will not approve any ad creatives that break the rules, guaranteeing ad chain flow security, ad quality and full industry compliance, whilst ensuring a great browsing experience. We closely monitor our advertisers’ campaigns, to make sure that all ads are appropriate and aligned with all industry regulators, looking to avoid quality breaches such as:
– Fake Messages: Ads or other elements that resemble chat apps, warnings, system dialogs, or other notifications that lead to an ad or landing page when clicked.
– Misleading Mouse Pointer/Tap/Swipe Icons: Banner or Landing Page elements that resemble a moving or clicking mouse pointer, a tap or a swipe icon that attempts to trick the user into interaction with the ad.
– Misleading Antivirus Alerts: Banner or Landing Page elements that resemble misleading statements, alert icons, alert colors that attempt to trick the user into believing that they have an issue that needs fixing on their device which is not true.
– Misleading Video Players: Banner or Landing Page elements that depict or imitate a video player including play icons, timers, scrollbars but then mislead the user.
#9- Keep up-to-date with Google updates
Google’s algorithms and policies change constantly, potentially impacting your SEO strategy and tactics! This makes Google Updates important events for publishers, with important changes that could either help or hurt your search ranking and visibility. So another one of the main tips to optimize google rankings is to aways keep up-to-date. Here are a few updates that have come with 2023:
– Third Party Cookies deprecation: Google plans to eliminate third party cookies and replace them with Topics API. This update has been in the works for a while, and in July 2022, the company announced that it is extending its deadline to the second half of 2024.
– Manifest V3 and Ad Blockers: During 2023, Google will be updating its Chrome extensions from Manifest V2, to Manifest V3, which might render ad blockers useless as extensions will not be able to modify the web requests anymore. This could shortly relieve the pressure on advertisers and publishers everywhere, until Adblocker developers understand the new manifest and can adapt their solutions to them.
– User-Agent (UA) Reduction and Client Hints (CH): This is another Google initiative affecting Chrome, which is meant to improve user privacy. The User Agent is the software that facilitates the interaction between the end user and the web content: web browsers, media players and plug-ins. This software allows web applications to gather information about the end user. This information is then used to optimize the user experience and better tailor the application’s content to the user context. For ad tech, this is a crucial step that allows better targeting for ad placements.
Conclusion
Now you know the main 9 tips to optimize google rankings for your site. In order to keep compliant at all times and prevent bad ads from getting in the way of obtaining a great reputation for your site’s business, once again, it is key to work with ad networks and partners that keep compliant at all times. AdNation offers only high quality ads that have been closely checked by a highly qualified compliance team, allowing you to showcase great and engaging content on your ad zones, increasing your business’ revenues, whilst staying on Google’s good side at all times. If you ant more tips to optimize google rankings, or need more information about AdNation’s adtech solutions, get in touch!
