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I would like to improve my website ranking

  • 12-11-2017 10:37am
    #1
    Irish Stones
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,308 ✭✭✭


    Hi everybody;
    I'm the owner of a non-commercial website. The structure of it was built by a friend of mine who is a master in this job (he worked for about 250 hours to make it), all the contents are uploaded by me as soon as I have the need to do it.
    The hit counter says about 4.5 million contacts (visitors and search engines) in less that 6 years. It would look like a good amount of traffic. I know there are persons who visit it regularly, thousands are returning visitors. Despite this, my pages are never shown among the first two pages of Google Search when looking for something that my website features. Other websites have the same stuff and are shown first or second in the Google Search.
    My friend has told me that if I want to rank my website first or among the first ones, he doesn't know how to help me, because this is a SEO matter.
    I do not want to make money from my website, I don't even have ads, and I don't want them. I would just like to see my website ranking high.
    I have read most of  THIS  guide, but it isn't my field of knowledge and I don't hink I have understood what I have to do.
    Are there "agencies" that I have to contact to do something? Or is there something that I have to tell my friend to do/add in my website code?
    Thanks a million!


Comments

  • #2
    PaulPinnacle
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 447 ✭✭PaulPinnacle


    Irish Stones wrote: »
    Are there "agencies" that I have to contact to do something?
    There are agencies out there that you could contact to help you improve your rankings, but none of them would be cheap and all would have fees attached for helping you. The fact that it's a non commercial site wouldn't be relevant to them. You're still using up their time, so they'd need their normal compensation to be in a position to help.
    Irish Stones wrote: »
    Or is there something that I have to tell my friend to do/add in my website code?
    As you'll see from the Moz guide you started reading, in the vast majority of cases it's not one or two things that need to be fixed to help with rankings. It's about making a large number of iterative gains in a whole host of areas that all start to work together to make a big difference. No single silver bullets, but investing in a few areas will start to pay off.

    Any changes you can make to your site that improve the experience for users of your site will tend to improve your rankings. Can you make your site faster? That will help. Can you better answer a users question and provide them with more valuable information? That will help. Google and other search engines do their best to understand their factors and build that into their algorithms for deciding on rankings.

    You've already started with one of the better guides using Moz, though they have more up to date resources now than the starters guide (which used to be the beginners bible). If you step through each of those sections one by one you'd soon be able to identify various areas that need attention.

    If those guides aren't working well for you, you could try some video content instead. We've put up talks from conferences we've held here in Dublin over the last few years that would touch on elements from technical SEO to PR.

    The other option there is to use a tool that would help automate identifying potential issues for you. So something like Sitebulb (does a great job at explaining the why as well as giving you the metrics), Ahrefs or Screaming Frog would all give you lots of information to work with. Obviously tools like this can't identify lots of potential problems in terms of design/layout/UX, but they'll definitely be able to help with some of the technical elements. Combine them with the information you get from Google Search Console and you'd probably have more than enough to keep you busy.

    It's all stuff that looks nasty and intimidating on the surface, but don't let it put you off. Pick one small area (like title tags), spend a little time reading up on that (on the Moz guides linked above) and then spend a little time tweaking your site with the knowledge you've gained. Keep an eye on how your rankings behave for a while after implementing them and you'll soon start to get a feel for what's working and what's not. The more of those small changes you make, especially where you can see it improving your traffic, the easier it'll be to jump in to make the future changes.


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