So you’ve made a significant investment in your new website over the past few weeks and months; you’ve spent time ensuring that it presents your company, products and services in the best possible light. You’ve stayed up late making sure that it’s easy, and attractive, for website visitors to click through and join your sales process, or order your products or services in just a few clicks. You’ve researched your clients and you know who your potential clients are, and you’re confident that your website speaks to them and engages them. Your website blasts your competitors’ sites out of the lake. Now you wait for all that juicy new business to arrive. You wait… and you wait…

Any small to medium business who has gone through this perplexing scenario soon discovers that as essential as good website design is, on its own, it’s insufficient. A great website is nothing without online reputation. How do you build a strong online reputation? Look to the big players on the web: the global (and local) gatekeepers of all web content: Google, and Bing, the search engine behemoths, the guardians and advocates of all web content, everywhere.

Search engines like Google and Bing are automatic – the chances are they will find your shiny new website on their own without you lifting a finger. The chances are also they will list and categorise your website far, far down their listings, where almost nobody will find it.

How do you build an online reputation to propel you to the top of Google’s search indexes? Read on…

The process of creating and strengthening your online reputation is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short). In short, Google uses automated search algorithms to decide the position your website will appear in their search results. These factors will determine whether your website appears at the top of Page 1 on Google, or half way down Page 237. Google is notoriously secretive about the factors it uses, but through experience and research, we have identified over 200 factors that will influence your position. The good news is that it’s possible to leverage these factors to boost your website’s ranking on Google. The better news is that we are going to show you a summary of some of the most important of these factors. Implement them, and you will see a difference. We guarantee it.

1.       Content is King.

Google’s new ‘Hummingbird’ algorithm rewards websites with unique and high-quality content. ‘High Quality’ means new articles on your website, regularly! They need to be longer than 500 words, and with keyword densities of around 2-3%.

2.       Mobile-friendly

Mobile- friendly design (also known as ‘responsive’ design) is a must-have in an age where over 50% of all Internet traffic is delivered to a mobile device.

Your website should adapt gracefully to smaller screen resolutions to get higher “mark” from Google. Remember to test your site on different devices and different mobile browsers. Sometimes there are small differences in rendering depending on the browser, for instance, Android with Chrome and iOS with Safari may display your website differently.

3.       Title and meta tags

Every page needs a metadata, and a structure. In HTML the most basic structure consists of a header, body, and footer, with your main body, sidebar and navigation in between.

Your page titles should all be optimized o ‘speak to’ your chosen keywords – those that best describe the content of the page.

A strong, logical structure to your page gives Google a sign that its well-organized and easy to follow for the reader. Remember to use standard HTML tags such as Title (H1 Tag), Subtitles (H2 tag), Ordered and Unordered lists, Metatags and Meta descriptions.

4.       Avoid Popups

Google’s newest update penalizes websites for using intrusive. Many people say that it doesn’t affect their ranking, but we would advise you to be careful when you plan to use more than 1 popup that might be considered as intrusive. Ideally, don’t use them.
Tip: Make it easy for the user to close the popup when it’s not interesting for them. Try to make your popups look neat and purposeful.

5.       Loading Time

Loading time isn’t only important for Google. It’s also important for users and to be specific, the user-experience. Nobody will wait 20 seconds to enter your website. 5 seconds for loading time is the maximum.

There are tens of factors that influence the loading time, such as code optimization, image size, website caching, CSS and code minimization, server response time and the number of requests to the server before the website is rendered. There is also number of other minor factors. You can assess your loading here: PINGDOM Tool.

6.       Server Location

Server location gives a Google a hint of where is your website located and to whom it should be displayed first. Let’s say that your server is located in Spain, but you operate only in English language and in the UK market. Google will notice your server location and you will be ranked slightly lower than your UK-server-based clone.

7.       Use a Validator

A W3C html and CSS validator may be a very useful tool when it comes to launching or auditing your website. It reveals any errors that you may have in your code and tells you how to fix them. It’s not widely described as important for Google rankings, but obviously if your website is full of coding issues than it might get some penalty points for being low quality website.

8.       Backlinks (still)

Backlinks are the links displayed on other websites that point to your website. If you have a lot of them, Google might decide that your website is important. Many people say that the era of backlinks is over. We definitely do not agree with that, but one thing is for certain: Quality matters more than ever – hundreds of backlinks from poor quality websites will not help you, and may even harm your search position. 100 very high quality links may be more powerful than 100 000 low quality ones. Try to get juice links from high ranked websitea that create a logical, useful connection to your page. If you provide dental services, but your backlink comes from a construction related blog, that might not make a lot of sense for Google.

9.       Social media

Your social media activity can account for an enormous proportion of the success of your website. There are a couple of things that you can do to improve your rankings in this respect. First, connect your social media account with your website. You can add “Follow me” and “Like” buttons, or =social media badges with newsfeeds. You should also include links pointing to your social media accounts.

Another good practice is to link back to your website from your social media accounts. Just as posting regular web content is important, so too is posting regular social media content. Share things that your customers will like. This creates more backlinks to your website from your social media accounts. Moreover, If they like it, they will share it. If somebody shares your article or retweets it, it generates another backlink to your website. With one good article you may generate quite a lot of high quality, relevant backlinks.

To improve your ranking in Google you can also sign up to Google for Business. It gives you the opportunity to add your business to Google Maps, create a Google+ account, and enable the right hand side sidebar when somebody searches for your business. The Google Sidebar provides information such as: location, photos, opening times, address with directions, phone number, description, reviews, and links to your website.

10.       Inform search engines using sitemap.xml and robots.txt

Google crawls through all of the websites on the internet. However sometimes it may take up to a few weeks until Google reaches your newly built website. It’s better to approach it first to get your website indexed in the search engine faster. If you use WordPress there are dozens of plugins that inform all the search engines at once about your new website. You can also request indexing from Google manually here: Google indexing.

Once your website is indexed in Google you need to remember the sitemap.xml file which represents the structure of the website and helps Google to spot any new pages and changes you’ve made to your website. Robots.txt is a standard that specifies how to inform the web robot about which areas of the website should and should not not be processed or scanned.

Last but not least. Do not underestimate Google.
There’s are countless historic examples of businesses – huge businesses, including the travel website Expedia – disappearing completely from Google. Expedia was effectively deleted by Google because they tried to artificially boost their search ranking by generating huge numbers of low-quality backlinks. Google judged Expedia to be ‘tricking’ them. Such SEO trickery is known in the business as “black-hat”, and it’s punishable by deletion!

Whatever you do, make it high quality, make it good for your customers, and Google will reward you!

You can check all of Google’s algorithm history here: CLICK

Sometimes it is better to leave it to experts to work on you SEO.
Here at Ionize we have professionals in SEO and marketing, and dedicated tools for analysing and fixing common and detailed problems.

Our process includes 3 steps:

1. Analysis and audit to find the problems.

2. Development part: to fix all the problems encountered.

3. Creative and marketing step: to promote your business and create content that will be valued by Google and your users.

You can call our SEO and Marketing Team or use the form below if you need a new website: 
0333 014 2035

7am-7pm, Monday-Friday