If you have a website or a blog that isn’t ranking well on the search engines, do you know why? Do you know how you can optimize your website for SEO (search engine optimization) so that it has the potential to start getting organic rankings? Google and all the other top search engines uses a number of ranking factors (signals) that they use in ranking websites. This is to ensure that they only use the best websites with the most accurate information on their index and not spammy websites.

Google looks at many aspects of your website to determine if your website is deserving a good ranking and if it’s trustworthy. Here’s a couple of tips you can use to optimize your website for SEO.

SEO optimization tips

Domain age: If you have a website that has been running for a couple of years – the better. The domain age is used as a ranking factor because it clearly shows that if you have an older domain, your website can be trusted and it’s not a fly by night website. When registering your domain, register it for a long period (1 year or more).

Links: Link building is the heart and soul of SEO. Make sure you are building links only from relevant and trustworthy sources. If the websites you are getting links from is spammy, it tells the search engines directly that your website cannot be trusted.

Legal: Add links to legal documents relevant to your business on your website such as a privacy policy and your terms. This shows Google and your visitors that you can be trusted.

Domain server: If your website is on a shared server with many other websites, do some research to check if the other websites are trustworthy. If your website is on a server with websites that are spammy, Google lists it as a bad neighbourhood and your website could lose out on potential organic rankings for this.

Content: Never write and optimize the content on your website only for the search engines. Focus first on your visitors and how you can help them with their problems. Content is still the driving force for SEO, but if you only optimize your content for Google and not your visitors, will they do business with you? If your visitors find your content interesting and share it along with their own community, it signals Google directly that your content is trustworthy.