Place your website in the top three places in Google results

Getting ranked on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) is a zero-sum game. If you can capture one of the top three spots, or at least page 1, your website is practically guaranteed to get a lot of visitors. If it’s on another page, most potential customers will never find it.

Effects of Google algorithm updates

Just when most webmasters became aware of search engine optimization (SEO), Google changed the way it ranked pages. In August 2011, it released the algorithm update for its search engine Panda. The biggest difference was that Google began to place much less emphasis on backlinks and gave more weight to social approval signals. This change continued when the Penguin update was released in April 2012.

Google’s search engine algorithm was originally designed before the explosion in popularity of social media. In these seemingly prehistoric days, which were actually less than a decade ago, web users had little opportunity to immediately respond to the content they were reading. As a result, a website’s ranking was primarily based on how many high-quality backlinks it had.

Signs of social approval

Penguin and Panda changed all that. Now, the ranking of a site is mainly determined by Internet users who can “vote” on the usefulness and quality of a site by hitting the Facebook “Like” button, re-tweeting it, using the “+1” button. on Google+.

Google uses these social approval signals to determine the value of a web page more quickly and accurately. As a result, their search engine algorithm relies more on social media-based pointers, rather than backlinks, to determine a site’s page rank.

So if you want your page to rank high, you need to make it easy for people to give you signs of social approval. Search engine marketing (SEM) should focus on encouraging people on social media to link to and approve of your pages, rather than focusing most of their time on creating backlinks, which are still useful but no longer are of primary importance.

Use of LSI keywords

While including the optimal number of keywords related to your niche (2 to 4 percent) is still vital to improve your ranking on Google, the Penguin version now also searches for latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords, a fancy term that basically means “synonyms”.

Google now gives preference to web pages that flow more organically, so pages that are optimally saturated with synonyms of the keyword are preferred to those that contain the same keyword declared over and over again.

Visitor behavior page

Another critical change is the value that the Google search engine now pays attention to the behavior of your page visitors once they get there. In addition to looking at things like how long the average visitor stays on your page and how often they return, the post-Penguin search engine also considers things like their click, browsing pattern, and bounce rate, or how many visitors click to zoom out. of your page after just a second or two, an indicator of a substandard page.

If visitors don’t find what they’re looking for when they come to your site, find your content boring, uninteresting, or find your content the same as what they can find elsewhere, your bounce rate will increase. Another thing that can increase the bounce rate is when the pages have audio or video that starts automatically. This tends to make visitors bounce back immediately, especially if they are viewing the page at work.

Decrease the ‘bounce rate’

To lower your bounce rate, you want to make it easier for high-targeted visitors to find your page and provide high-value content once they get there. These SEM techniques will keep your visitors interested for longer by improving the way Google ranks your page.

Another thing to consider is the keywords that attract visitors to your page: Are they the most suitable? Otherwise, users who arrive and do not find what they are looking for are likely to leave quickly, which will negatively affect your SERP rank.

Finally, design your page by including clearly defined links within it to other pages within your site so that visitors can easily navigate to the specific information they want. This helps reduce page bounce and keep visitors on your pages longer, which improves ranking.