In the online business or ecommerce world, security is also important for users who need to input personal information such as bank accounts or even mobile numbers. Google understands this thoroughly and wants to promote security as the primary requirements for these kinds of websites.
This 2015, in the continuous improvements of Google’s meaningful search, they add security as vital part of the buying or ecommerce experience online. This means Google loves ecommerce websites and websites requiring personal information from their users that has good security features. In fact, Google increase the rankings of those websites that secure the user session by HTTPS, according to their post here.
If you want your site to be successful (more readers, more customers), you need to be friend with Google and maintain good rankings on its search engine. Today, let’s focus on security and qualifications for a Google-friendly website.
The way Google ranks websites is constantly evolving and they will never talk about that openly. However, based on experience and research, you can increase your rankings through…
1. Keywords – If your website is about dogs, this means you talk more about dogs than cats in your blogs or pages. Google receives these signals called keywords and they will categorize your site through topic or relevancy. The more content you publish about dogs on your site, the more signal you’ll send to Google telling them that you really are a dog website. If you talk about dog food or dog toys, the more chances you will have to rank high on those keywords as well, because Google knows you are a dog site and those terms are relevant to you. In order to rank high on relevant keywords, you need to update your content continuously with related articles (at least 500 words per article) in order to build coherence. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to find keywords relevant to your business or industry. Use these keywords as titles or topics in your articles or content.
2. Metadata – This is the label to your website like the front page of a book. Its main purpose is to talk to browsers and search engines. Google still look for your metadata as one of the factors of your relevance. The point there is a website with a label “dog website” will have the higher percentage to talk about dogs than a site labeled “man’s best friend.” Include metadata on each webpage. You can use the three basic metadata inside your tags.
Title Metadata tells browsers how to name your page.
Description Metadata gives browsers textual description of your page in search results. These two are what people could see at the (SERP) Search Engine Results Page. Some may put all the stuff they want to rank to in their metadata but Google is smart enough to detect relevance though.
Keyword Metadata are the search terms (word or phrases) that people type on Google to find your website. You need put relevant keywords in this tag in order to gain more chances of traffic. The temptation is to write everything including words that are not relevant to your page, there is a warning though – Google does not love keyword stuffing. The best recommendation is to come up with 6-8 phrases each consisting of 1-4 words that best describe your site. Google rewards accuracy here and of course, relevance. The best practice with keywords is to think about them before even jumping to your business or online endeavor. You can use Wordtracker.com keywords tool in order to get an updated insights on what keywords to use.
3. Website Security – Google aims to give the best experience to its users every time they search something on their search engine. With that reason, user protection is also important to them especially with the challenge of smarter and emerging online threats. If your site is secure, they will rank your website higher because they want their users to be safe in your site rather than going anywhere else. This is according to a post at Google Online Security Blog on August 6th 2014.
You can contact your domain or website hosting service and ask them about SSL Certification if you have an ecommerce or membership site (Normal blogs don’t need to bother at all). Some hosting companies provide this free for 1 year, so you need to subscribe to them. Arvixe provides free SSL for 1 year (like most of the services out there). We recommend Arvixe because of our experience with them (we also have different experiences with other hosts). You can read this post on how to protect your site with an SLL certificate here.
An SSL certificate will enable your site to have HTTPS:// in your website address, which means your site and the data users input to it undergo encryption. This will prevent data breaches cause by hackers or bad neighbors. Encryption means changing the original data into hard to understand version of it. Whenever someone wants to sneak in, he/she will have almost useless data for their benefit. Read the article above now and start securing your site – for more traffic.
4. Page Load Speed – Part of the best user experience philosophy of Google is to favor fast loading sites. Faster websites are easy to read, navigate, and work on. People don’t like slow websites because it will just eat up their time and they are just plain source of frustration.
You can test your site if it loads faster or slower, based on highly acceptable standards. You are looking for the average time needed in order to load your site (completely). You can use Google’s Free Page Load Test here. You need to have a green score or something above 80/100. Google Page Load Test will also provide helpful tips on how to optimize your site on both desktop and mobile environment. Some of the tips are highly technical. You can ask an IT friend to help you or research more about it. Take advantage of this tool and improve the speed of your site in order to signal Google of your website’s user-friendliness. Having a reliable hosting, providing a cached version of your site and using Content Delivery Networks can dramatically improve your site’s loading speed.
5. Trust – Yes, it is a big word and it is the name of a famous brand of contraceptives too. Google has a way of measuring the trustworthiness of a website, which highly affects the way they rank them. Links or votes from other trusted websites, social media mentions, time duration of every visit, and security will all play big for your rankings. Point is if you have something valuable or useful in your site, visitors will naturally love you. You can submit relevant guest posts, research, or useful information to banks, government websites, school websites, and non-profit organizations, in order to gain trust.
6. Positive Experience – Google will smile with you if you enjoyed a website. How will you enjoy a website? What is positive experience? Well, you visited this site and it is very easy to navigate. You can go to where you want by just a click. Articles are jargon-free and easy to understand even without prior knowledge about the topic. You get what you want. You stayed there for more. You shared it to your friends. You went back to it for updates. You researched on it on your phone while shopping. The website is just the right place for your needs. Thanks to Google, this website ranks high when you searched about that need. That kind of website is what you want for your own.
Positive experience is a product of a well-built, well-designed, and well-written website. We recommend using templates from Themeforest. They provide templates built with the best practices and standards of the industry. They also have a big library to choose from, no matter what kind of website or platform do you use. What you need is a template that is easily accessible by modern browsers, professional looking, SEO-friendly, responsive (mobile-friendly), no bugs/errors, and could house your high quality easy-to-read content.
Conclusion:
Google is more human than a robot. It thinks and acts like an ordinary user. While there are ways to boost your rankings, it should happen naturally because of your content and the kind of experience you provide to users. Don’t try to outsmart Google; it is the foolish way. Instead, be smart like it. Its primary goal is to improve its search engine to the fullest that even a more sophisticated alien technology will praise it. If that is what it wants, help it. Then, Google will surely help you back.
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