8 On Page SEO Techniques That Will Rank Your Website First On Google


SEO strategies change with such rapidity that the tricks you used in 2018 might not work now. We need to stay updated all the time, to not miss out on the trends. If not, your competitors will take over the SERPs and you can miss out on a lot of business.

With this post, we have broken down the best SEO techniques for 2019 to help you improve your rankings. These will not only boost your monthly visitors but also keep you up with the best techniques.

Ways to organically make your website rank

Let us explore both the classic and trending ways to improve your website rank:

1. Improve User Experience

Let us first analyze what Google does for its users. Their primary goal is to give their users the best experience. How do they do so? They offer the most relevant results to a user’s query. Now, if the users get irrelevant results, they will shift to other search engines. However, Google is the most used search engine because they offer the best to its users.

Similarly, as a website owner, you need to think about how your website adds value to the people who search for you. You definitely need to use relevant keywords, but that doesn’t always improve the quality of your website.

People don’t want to land on spam web pages that take ages to load. It creates a high bounce rate that can also frustrate a user and make him shift to another site. Moreover, Google hasn’t officially announced this, but it does reward sites with low bounce rate and high ranking.

Google is pretty straight and simple in terms of how they value websites. If it sees that users stay on a website for long it reflects the fact that they found something worthwhile. Since Google wants to offer their best to users, they push those sites ahead. This is a sheer way to come up on SERPs.

2. Add Interesting Content

Have you ever heard people format content for the web? Well, it is a way to improve organic ranking and for that, you need to concentrate on the quality of content. It primarily has to be readable and well formatted. Note that, the more people read your content, the less bounce rate the website will have.

Adding interesting and unique content to your website is important and plays a key role in creating an inbound marketing plan for your brand.

Try out the following tips to make your content more engaging and you’ll find organic traffic soon:

(a)   Write short paragraphs

Paragraphs shouldn’t be more than 2-3 lines. There are people who write one sentence per paragraph, and readers find it engaging too. They add those sentences sparingly to not look like bullet points. Neil Patel’s blog posts are the best examples of this.

The paragraphs must be a group of related sentences that are shaping up the same objective. You can even split one objective into two paragraphs if there is more to write. People often scroll through big paragraphs because they don’t want to spend time. Moreover, talking about too many things through one paragraph can be confusing.

(b)   Combine Sentence Lengths

Long sentences can be really hard to read, especially on phone screens. You can use them sparingly or mix them with short or medium length sentences. 20 words are ideal for each sentence so you can break long ones into two.

(c)   Format It Well

An average person spends 37 seconds to read a piece of content online. How do you make them stay on your piece for 10 minutes and read all that you wrote?

You primarily need to add subheadings within the body of the text so that the paragraphs don’t look like blocks of words. You need to use bullet points where you want to share quick facts and make the article look neater. Paragraph space and images are other essential criteria and they offer visual appeal.

A piece of content primarily needs correct grammar so that it is easily explicable to the readers. However, the overall appeal of online content is as crucial as the quality of content. Not having the right format will neither make your readers stay nor make you rank high on Google.

3. Improve Website Usability

SEO is not limited to content and keywords optimization. You need to optimize your website because Google doesn’t only rely on the search terms but also the usability of the website. This means, that getting visitors to your website is not enough to dramatically increase your rankings. It needs to add value to them so that they can give you back what you want in return.

Adding value to customers not only improves your traffic but also boosts conversion. If you have products and services to offer, people will navigate to you and that makes Google find you credible.

Brands even prefer to consult agencies which provide search engine optimization services to get their ranking better in the search results of Google.

4. Confirm Ranking

You need to look for phrases in Google that confirm your ranking. You might not know that the ‘average position’ isn’t the same as rankings. There are times you’d find yourself rank more than reports suggest while other times you won’t see the site grow at all.

The most common reasons for such discrepancies are:

  • The site can have more than a page that ranks with the same phrase
  • It might rank in image search results
  • The rank report can be different at present compared to the average of a date range
  • The search results can be personalized – based on location, browsing history, and so on.

To resolve the issue with search results, you can easily log out of Google and use the incognito setting. Opt for another browser rather than the one you always use by using a proxy server to connect with Google. You can also try out Google’s Ad Preview tool for this.

Remember that neutral searches are a myth, which is why A/B testing for Google is not possible. Don’t worry about going anonymous as it will not harm your website. But don’t expect the data to be accurate. The results will be approximate and give you cues to determine your next move.

5. Make URLs Crawl-able

Craw-able URL helps Google spiders to crawl your website and understand what content you post. It simplifies the method for these bots to crawl through your web pages and add them in Google’s web index. It is one of the easiest and smartest ways that website owners use right now to rank on the first page.

6. Optimize Voice Search

Another trending feature that businesses are incorporating is voice search. Nearly 50% of searches will be done on voice by 2020. People are tired of typing long texts and are rather using an assisted device to answer their questions.

If you think that voice has nothing to do with SEO, then you’re wrong. People who search for voice have different requirements than people who type. The voice devices like Alexa, Siri, Amazon, and Google Home use information from SERPs to replay data from snippets.

Just how you expect people to find you on the first page of Google through written content, voice helps too. It is better you get mentally prepared on how soon you plan to incorporate voice because you will eventually need this advancement.

7. Know Your Target Audience

The kind of content you write will cater to a certain type of audience. You need to know them to reach out to them better. Factors like location, interests, age, income, are essential considerations to customize content accordingly.

For example, your keyword tool could be ‘Android’ with a search volume of 2,740,000 every month. You might think that you’d get exposed to a huge audience, but that’s not how it works. People looking for Android could be searching for mobile services, robotics, or even mistype with droids.

If you don’t know your target audience, you might want to add content for all these topics. Such steps will neither improve your rankings nor draw in organic traffic. You cannot add content about three different things when your objective is one.

You need to build buyer personas and explain the traits of your ideal customer. It minimizes the chances of wasting time on content people won’t read.

8. Social Signals

When people share your content on social media, it not only grows your traffic but also helps you understand your target audience. Although Google officially mentioned that social shares don’t offer direct ranking, still we cannot deny that the highest ranking pages in the search engine have lots of shares.

When people repost or share your content on social media, they make it available for more people to see. Thus, it does improve your ranking indirectly if not directly.

We all need social media presence to promote our work and make it more accessible for the audience. Amplify your social media as much as possible to stay more connected to your target audience. It helps you create a stronger bond because everything seems transparent and people can easily reach out.

Final Thoughts

We all know the phrase that goes “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. Similarly, a good website needs time to grow organically. With a mix of new and old SEO strategies, you can rank on the first page of Google for sure. You just have to choose the best way to do so and give it the nurturing it needs. Also, make sure you don’t go against the rules of Google to prevent penalties.

Author Bio

Prakhar Gajendrakar is a passionate and enthusiastic content specialist at Walnut Folks. He loves writing short novels and blogs and is a connoisseur of Urdu poetry. As an aspiring filmmaker at heart, he ardently follows the works of Anurag Kashyap, Gulzar, Piyush Mishra and Christopher Nolan. When not found at his desk, you can expect him to be either dancing to an upbeat Bollywood number, or humming some Sufi tunes