With competition intensifying, each company wants its keywords to rank on page 1 of Google but most do not know how to go about the process of improving the ranking.

There are two methods of improving ranking- On-page and Off-page optimization. This blog talks about On-page optimization.

One of the basic tenets of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that each web page must have proper meta tags in place in the source code. These are the title and description tags that one may see in well designed pages (by pressing Ctrl U on either Firefox or Chrome.) Yet, it is amazing that a very high percentage of companies either do not have meta tags in place or have defective meta tags. The starting point therefore is to use a competent digital agency to analyze the meta tags on each web page and get them to insert proper tags.

There are also many cases of large companies whose website has grown explosively and who are then at a loss as to where to start optimizing their web pages.

If your company has over 30,000 pages, for example, where does one start? This was a dilemma faced by one of our clients. The solution that we offered: do an A-B-C- analysis of the pages to see which pages get the maximum traffic and start optimizing those pages first. It turned out that just 300 pages of this company attracted over 70% of the traffic and these pages provided a good starting point for SEO.

Once the meta tags have been inserted, the content of each page needs to be examined to check the keyword density. If the meta tags speak of, say, digital widgets, but the incidence of the phrase “digital widgets” is very low in the page, Google would tend to assume that the page is not really about digital widgets and down-rank the page. A competent digital agency needs to study and fix the keyword density in the content as described above. This would result in an enhancement of ranking. Pages also need to be periodically revisited and their content checked so as to ensure that they are up-to-date. This can enhance search engine rankings.

Many websites achieve high page rankings after having carried out the SEO exercise. However, rankings are dynamic and keep moving up and down (a.k.a the Google Shuffle). Companies must, therefore, constantly monitor the pages on their website to ensure that they maintain the rankings. This is best done by their digital agency who will take corrective steps as soon as a ranking drop is noticed to get the ranking restored.

Finally, make sure that the Google crawler can visit every page of your website. This is best achieved by having a site map on the home page.

If you have a ranking problem, please free to email me (prakash@peppersquare.com)