How to rank higher on search engines: 7 SEO Tips for your website 

Posted by By Maria Serra 11 Min Read
How to rank higher on search engines 2023

Contents

Introduction 

How to rank higher on search engines? This is every webmaster’s eternal question. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Search engines have become a natural way for users to find answers to questions, buy products, stay tuned for news, discover locations, etc. Google is the most visited website in the world and it makes our lives easier by giving us access to never-ending information. Furthermore, Google’s search engines are fully-automated algorithms aimed to rank websites and filter data based on 3 types of queries that people make, and according to their buyer’s cycle:

  1. “Do” queries – Transactional content
    Do queries are intended to complete a transaction such as buying a product, downloading a movie, or even ordering food to take away. Example: “Buy running shoes”
  1. “Know” queries  – Informational content
    The user is looking for specific information. Example: “How to make noodles”
  1. “Go” queries – Navigational content
    The search query is intended to find a particular website. Example: “TOROAdvertising”

Certainly, it is important to be aware of the keywords combinations that users ‘type in’ because search engines will display online stores, different websites, and varied types of content depending on the transactional, informational or navigational queries. Additionally, search engines rate and rank a website based on hundreds of different ranking elements before showing what the algorithm thinks is the most relevant websites, in descending order, according to the user’s query. In fact, the first five organic results displayed on the search engine’s first page generate more than 67% of all clicks, because very few people searching, look past the first page of displayed results.

In addition, SEO has itself evolved to try to take care of people’s searches with user experience becoming a crucial deciding factor on the ranking order of search engines. For example, for a landing page or sales website, organize the site’s content by thinking like the buyer of the product, providing a successful website experience for both your visitors and search engines. SEO has become a must-do task either for webmasters or brands in order to capture qualified leads and generate conversions. Fortunately, TORO Advertising is aware of these daily challenges so to ensure that you know how to rank higher on search engines, we have listed the top 7 SEO tips for your website. Let’s go!

Top 7 SEO Tips for your website 

1# Know your target audience and their intent search 

Knowing the needs and pain points of your target audience will help you to provide them with the most relevant information. A search engine’s goal is to make sure that your pages satisfy the ‘search intent’ behind the keywords they are being used for the search. So if you want to rank on Google, you need to put effort into identifying the different intent search types.

The best way to improve your rankings with search intent is to start by using keywords with a clear search intent instead of a mixed search intent. Long-tail keywords have a clearer search intent than one or two-word keywords. Using something like SEM Rushes Magic Keyword Tool, you can easily see the intent of any keyword you want to rank for. As a result, you can better understand your audience and market, ensuring that you can match search intent queries with the most relevant content that you produce.  This is key to knowing how to rank higher on search engines.

2# Write quality content

The main goal of search engine optimization is to provide the most relevant information for a user’s intent searches. So to get your page at the top of search results, you need to create great content that people are looking for. According to Google, the most basic relevant signal is whether your content contains the same keywords as the search query. In addition, Google’s systems prioritize content that seems to be the most helpful, content that demonstrates expertise, authority and trust. But how can we use this to rank higher on search engines?

Always think quality over quantity. ChatGPT has been talked about a lot recently for creating good SEO content. But we would advise on using this with caution. The answers can be quite generic and therefore there will be a lot of copycat texts on various websites using AI, which will affect SEO negatively. The benefit here is finding the info for you quickly when preparing the page’s content, but it will require editing, not just to stand out with SEO, but also to explain the individual value proposition to the target audience. Here are some useful tips to use ChatGPT for SEO.

3# Choose the focus keyword

One of the key factors as to how to rank higher on search engines is the focus keyword. The focus keyword is essentially the word that describes best what your website is about. A keyword or keyphrase is the search term that you want to rank with for your website. Search engines will use the focus keyword to recognize what the website or page is all about. So, when people search for that keyword in Google, they will find your website. In order to choose the right keywords that will help you rank your website, you need to get into the mind of your potential audience and use the words they would use when they are searching. 

Where to add your keywords?

  • The page title and SEO title
  • Headers and subheaders
  • Image alt text
  • Meta description
  • Meta tagging within the code of your pages
  • Body Content
  • URL Slug
  • Inbound links

4# Use internal links for SEO

Another way to know how to rank higher on search engines is internal linking. An internal link is any link from one page to another page from your website. Both users and Google’s search engines use internal links to navigate around your website to find the most relevant and useful information. By adding useful internal links within your website, you can guide your potential customers to the most important content, and also help Google to establish a hierarchy and structure of your site. Therefore, internal links help search engines to better find your content and provide the most useful content to your audience. 

5# Build quality backlinks 

Backlinks in SEO improve your rankings and help to build authority because when your website is linked to others it gives signals of quality to search engine algorithms. In this way, they recognize that your website is worth it to be linked to and take this into consideration when ranking your website. But how to rank higher on search engines with backlinks? Again these links need to be top quality websites, outbound links to websites like Wikipedia, statistics driven websites or high-ranking useful content will bring you a higher ranking. 

6# Create SEO-friendly URLs

First of all, keep the structure as simple as possible. Additionally, consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans.

Best practices for creating SEO-friendly URLs:

  1. Keep it short
  2. Include keywords in URLs
  3. Remove numbers and superfluous information
  4. Be careful with subdomains
  5. Make it lowercase
  6. Describe your content
  7. Use hyphens to separate words

7# Fast-loading and high-performing website

A fast-loading website offers a more satisfactory user experience. According to Core Web Vitals, a subset of factors that Google considers important for a webpage’s overall user experience, Google prioritizes results that load fast and have interactivity and visual stability. 

Optimizing and monitoring your website for UX metrics is crucial to provide visitors with the best experience possible and gaining a high rank by search engines.

Tools for measuring Core Web Vitals:

Conclusion

We hope this article has helped you to know how to rank higher on search engines. Every day, billions of users use Google to carry out their daily searches. So, It is not hard to understand that Google dominates the search engine market with 91.9% market share. The future of SEO is likely moving to AI transformation and it will have a huge impact on search intent and how search engine algorithms interpret users’ queries. For good or for bad, search engine optimization will develop its research-based technologies in order to better match the most relevant content for the user’s query. As a result, SEO is sure to become even more complex and competitive in the future.