The truth about rankings on Google is that 99% of the time, they will be too low to get you good traffic. But I’ll show you my 15 proven ways to improve them.
Here’s just a small sample of some of the high positioned pages I have occupied thanks to these methods:
Now originally, this guide had 10 ways listed on how to improve your search engine rankings, especially on Google, but I did improve upon that and added 5 more important ones. I follow these 15 guidelines every single time for the following circumstances:
- Either I’ll have an existing page that isn’t ranking well enough and a considerable time has passed to know that it won’t go any higher.
- Or I’ll make sure that a new page of content I create has all of the things checked off on it to basically maximize the odds that it’ll hit the first page and even first spot on Google.
Yet, despite these insured ways of doing SEO (it’s pretty much the most important things you can do), I will still admit to you (any legitimate SEO expert will admit this too), that it’s still IMPOSSIBLE to rank on the first spot or page on Google for every single keyword you attempt to do it for.
And this is especially the case for the more higher volume/higher competition keywords you try to appear for. So moving forward, I need you to understand that while my approach WORKS, its not a complete guarantee.
However, any improvement to your existing, bad rankings is better than nothing right?
Well if you agree with this, and you want to get more traffic, then I promise you, my 10 ways WILL help you get closer to that at the very least, and at the very most, you’ll still get more traffic than you did before. I’m certainly practicing these methods, and I wouldn’t be doing it, if I knew they were a waste of time, so you already know I’m not aiming to waste yours…
Contents
Again, there’s actually 15 methods (There’s a video below showing them for extra help):
The first 10 methods are actually an insurance to make sure your page does as best as it can in the SERPS initially, and the next 5 methods will actually explain what to do if the first 10 aren’t enough to do it, which MAY happen.
So consider the extra 5 methods as extra insurance. More methods used = more chances of higher positions, and who would be against that?
Anyway here are the first 10:
Now if ANY of these 10 things I just listed are new to you are things you do not understand or need more clarity on, I’ve got great news:
Read this post where I literally detail each one and explain how they IMPROVE positioning on Google.
The fact of the matter is that each of these things I just listed are all ensuring that you’re producing high quality content on your page that is optimized for both Google to spot it and rank it easily, and when people read it, to have them have an enjoyable reading experience that is noted by Google, to also help push it further up in the SERPS.
These are current, past and future trends you WILL want to practice for great SEO results.
Now this is what I want you to do (good homework for you):
1) Go through every single article you have on your site, and optimize it according to those 10 things. Make absolutely sure you are NOT changing ANY permalink on ANY page (method 2 on the list), because if you do, you are going to create 404 errors.
So just don’t touch it, only change the title and content, but leave the link (permalink) intact.
2) As you create NEW content (and you need to if you wish to get higher rankings for the site and past pages), ALSO use these 10 tips whilst it’s being made, then publish it once you know the new article you created has all 10 tips included.
Next, only use the next 3 methods if…
Your site is OVER 6 months old.
If your site is NOT this old, and you updated your old and new articles with the methods above, do not touch them, just optimize it once and leave it alone while publishing new articles.
What happens to sites that are under 6 months old is that they are in the Google Sandbox, and until that period passes, it won’t matter how much you optimize your pages, they will not rank well. So while you should use these 10 tips I gave on existing and new pages, if your site is in the Google Sandbox, ONLY optimize it once, then leave it alone.
A lot of people do not know about the sandbox and expect a new site to rank high, early. This will NOT happen until 6 months pass, so let that period go by, then see if the rankings pick up. If they do, just don’t touch it and let it pick up organically.
You did the 10 things, your site is not in the sandbox, but you’re still not ranking high.
Let’s say I published content following the 10 guidelines and I did it after my site was no longer in the sandbox. Now I’ll wait at least a month and track the rankings.
How do you track keyword rankings? Here’s one free option.
If I see that it’s very stagnant (not rising at all), I will implement the next 5 following methods I’ll describe to you.
Here are the next 5 methods:
Do note that you don’t need to do all 5, but the more of them that you do, the better it’ll impact the positioning of your page.
1) Create a YouTube video and link it to the page that isn’t ranking well.
YouTube itself is an awesome place to create content and allows you to link those videos to any page you want. For SEO and ranking purposes, link the video/s you create to the page that needs a boost. Obviously, make sure your videos are actually high quality in how the content is presented.
What happens here is that this method provides an extra, high quality backlink to your particular page that needs SEO help. I have a very good example to share with you where I did this very thing for a client and it helped his website climb to the first page.
You can also create multiple YouTube videos and link it to the same page if necessary.
For example:
Let’s suppose I write an article on 10 body language signs that show lies and the article follows through with the 10 tips laid out above.
The site it’s on is over 6 months, and after publishing this article, a month goes by and I find that the article isn’t doing well in Google, and that it hasn’t experienced any improvement.
What I’ll do is, I’ll go to YouTube, create a video on the same subject and then link it to the very same article. That’s how this method works.
2) Publish new content and interlink it to the one/s which aren’t ranking well.
If there is one method I suggest you use to get higher rankings for your site overall, it’s to frequently publish new content. It creates new opportunities for your page to rank for other keywords and being that the more you do this, there’s more chances that more of this new content created will actually rank on the first page.
In fact, if I do everything I listed on this article and it still doesn’t raise it high enough to hit page 1 spots, I’ll keep publishing new content and finding other keywords to rank for. At least this way, I will continue to grow my site and it’s rankings.
But the purpose of this specific method, besides being good for SEO overall, is that the new content created itself should follow the 10 tips I outlined, particularly tip #5, which is internally linking and in this case, internally linking to the very same article/post that we want to get ranked higher.
3) Open up a comments section, add a share button, and encourage shares and comments within your article.
This method should itself be mandatory for every article you create, but you’d be surprised to know how people literally leave these things out of their websites and it literally can cause rankings to tank. Make sure whatever settings you use on your website (WordPress is my preferred option since it makes this easy) allow for people to actually comment on your content and share it.
Opening up the site itself for comments is literally something that takes a few clicks.
Adding the option to share the content you make is literally just adding a plugin that makes it pop up on your site. On my page, I am using the Social Pug plugin.
This very action improves rankings:
4) Improve the content (in it’s quality and in it’s quantity).
Many people who post content tend to overrate the value and quality of it and if you see that the content you post isn’t doing well, one reason why is because it needs to improve it’s quality. There’s nothing wrong with going back into a post/article that already doesn’t do well on Google and…
- Redoing it.
- Deleting sections of it and adding new, updated info.
- Just adding new content to it.
For example, suppose you reviewed a product that you rated well and news comes out that it’s bad. You would want to update your article in that case to reflect the updated information, because if people read your article and see the information is outdated (due to the news), they will negatively view your content and leave, which will affect Google rankings.
When you make these changes, you are taking steps to improve the content of the article and that already gives it better chances to get higher positions than it did before. I still do this day, look at old articles I’ve written and sometimes update them.
5) When all the changes are made, use Google fetch option.
If significant changes are made to an existing article/post you have that wasn’t doing well, make sure you let Google know about it by using the fetch tool. They will find it faster this way and while it will basically “reset” the process of the article/post ranking, it’ll set it up to have higher and better chances of hitting higher positions this time around.
These 15 methods will 100% raise your rankings, but…
Like I said before, they will NOT 100% guarantee that this rise will make the page/s hit page 1 or position 1 on Google. It is very important to know there is no such site that literally occupies position 1 on Google for every single keyword it attempts to chase.
Know that if you did not get the desired results, and that the page, despite these 15 methods did not hit the first page/spot, that you should not worry about it and continue to focus on method 12 (build up more content).
I find that many people dwell far too much on having one page with 1 targeted keyword rank high and if it doesn’t, they overspend too much time and energy trying to make it rise, when at the same time, that effort could be put to writing more content, publishing it for other keywords and getting the traffic from those efforts.
Remember, if it doesn’t rank high despite the effort you put in, let it go and continue to build the site through other keywords you’re targeting, and make sure all of them are also following the same 10 original methods.
You will find that this approach will build up your SEO, your rankings and grow your site beyond what you expected, trust me!
I’ve got another great tip for improving your Google Rankings: Updating dates.
One of the SEO experts I consult with has been suggesting that whenever you go back and make edits to previous articles or blogs on your site, that you should also update the date of that post, before you fetch it again, to show Google that you’ve made changes and updates to it.
Now while Google will see itself (without the date change) that you’ve done this, from a visual perspective, it helps the reader see that the article they are reading isn’t that old. Plus, this same individual who I trust showed me a number of cases where this updated date method has helped his pages improve in ranking on Google.
Changing dates (updating them) should only be done if you indeed make true updates to the said content that you wish to get to rank higher. So for example, as I made edits and updates to this article (adding in the new tip), I am going to change the date this article was originally published which was on March 18th, 2019 to April 20th, 2019, aka when the edits were made.
So just for reference, here’s ALL 15 methods listed out:
Update: I’ve created a video listing all 15 methods:
And just so you see that these methods DO work, here’s one of my websites which I’ve been applying this too (individually across each page and post):
And for this site, I have barely been putting up new content. The MAIN focus I had was optimizing my old posts and this is actually still considered a form of creating NEW, improved content, which counts just as equally for your rankings.
I bookmarked this article a while ago as my site was not yet 6 months.
Having passed this milestone now I have revisited it to refresh myself and start going through my posts and improving them.
Just one question: Can having too many internal links harm your rankings or is it the more the better? I have currently been adding 1-2 within a post of between 1,000-2,000 words.
Thanks for the great article 🙂
That’s perfectly fine Martin and I would actually advise adding more internal links, but make sure that a majority of them in each post point to other pages on your site so there’s a healthy link diversity happening.
For example, if you have a 1,000 word post internally link 10 times to only one post, it won’t rank as high as a 1,000 word post with 10 internal links, each pointing to different pages on your site.
Ok thanks I totally understand.
Not a problem 🙂
Hi Vitaliy,
I always find your articles inspiring and spot-on, and this one is no exception.
I always try to follow most of what you listed above when optimizing my post, and though I do get some rankings, its not as much as I hoped for. So I would love to further try out the extra five methods you added.
YouTube is something I haven’t had time to work on yet, but hopefully implementing the other four will help boost my posts for now.
I would like to ask you a question on post titles and permalinks because I am a little confused here. Is it okay to change a post title but not the permalink, or do I just leave them both alone?
Secondly, when it comes to updating an old post date after updating its content, does this also apply to posts that are up to a year old or just more recent posts?
Thirdly, the idea of using H3 tags and including the target keyword in it is a little confusing as I was made to understand that it’s better to use the H1 tag.
Then, when it comes to adding the keyword in the image Alt tag, you said that you only fill it in one of the images, does that mean you leave the other images blank or you don’t just include the keyword in the rest of them.
I ask this because I usually add the keyword in every single image I use, and don’t know if that is appropriate.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks!
Hi Queen, these are all awesome questions and I’m sure a majority of people who read this guide and have questions will be asking the same things, so here are the following answers:
1) It is fine to change the title, just don’t change the permalink. You can also leave the title alone, but if your page isn’t ranking well, a better title could improve that so it’s worth that risk.
2) If you update really old posts, that are at least a year old, update the date for those. You can also update posts and pages which are a few weeks or even several months old, but I usually leave them alone until I see that they aren’t gaining any rankings.
3) I personally dislike using H1 tags because they are too big and the title of your page or blog post is already an H1 tag. I know an SEO expert who doesn’t go beyond H2 tags but I believe making big titles like this can be annoying to read. H3 tags are perfectly fine in my experience for SEO.
4) I usually add the main keyword I’m chasing in one of the images in my posts and pages and other images and posts I add will include a keyword too that is similar. I just don’t like duplicating the same alt text in all my images.
Hi Vitaliy!
Very informative article. I am using the techniques you have described already, and for the moment creating new content regularly, without updating the old ones.
Besides, I have reached, with a couple of articles, high positions on Bing and Yahoo, but never on Google, not even close to that. I have noticed that even with high positions on Bing and Yahoo, the traffic doesn’t “flow”. There is no significant traffic from this. It seems that only Google really gets a higher volume of traffic.
However, the info you provided is very useful.
Thanks for sharing!
Best regards,
Igor
Hi Igor, you should not discount the rankings you have on Yahoo and Bing, because high positions there can help you with Google in that people who do visit your page through the other search engines (albeit little), who display a positive browsing experience will get noted by Google and it will help your page rise in Google from that.
I always take Bing and Yahoo very seriously, which is why I also use the Bing webmaster tools app they have. Apply the methods I listed in this article, keep ranking high on Bing, and growing the site you have and it will work out.
This is an excellent article.
What external sites do you link to for authority?
What do you mean by using fetch on google?
I actually copied the content to a word document so I could implement your ideas into my own site. My site has just been indexed so I am looking forward to seeing where I stand.
Thank you for the great ideas.
There’s a number of authority sites I usually link to: Major SEO websites like MOZ, specific Wikipedia pages, links to ad networks like Google or Google’s webmaster blog. Basically linking to any legit site that is popular and relevant to the content you’re writing would be a good external link.
As for fetching as Google, it’s now called the URL inspection tool. It is a manual way to get Google to index your new content (or old one) faster. Here is how you can use it.
I am doing a mental checklist as I read through your techniques on improving rankings on Google – something that I’ve been struggling for a while now.
Based on the latest data, my average position went from 28 to 14 so I guess that’s a good sign, but I would like to push it further because conversion is really poor for the past two months.
Question – with the new Search Console, where exactly can you do fetch as Google? Thanks Vitaliy!
Hi Cathy, it’s now called the URL inspection tool and I have created a video here that shows how to use it. It’s actually a lot simpler than the old fetch tool.
As for your site’s rankings improving, GREAT job! What I would do right now are 2 things:
1) Go through all your old posts which AREN’T ranking high and do the 15 things, especially the tip about updating the date. I have seen this tip work VERY well for myself and other site owners. Once you update the date, use the new URL inspection tool to tell Google to look it over.
2) Regarding the part about pushing your posts even further, once you do the 15 things, you have to give it some time to see if the rankings improve. I would say, give it a month or even two months, monitor the ranking and if it doesn’t move up at all, or even drops, redo the same 15 things for the post/s in question and then do the URL inspection again.
3) Try not to focus too much on optimizing your old posts at the expense of creating new ones. Focus on the latter and during your free time, optimize the old ones.
Hi! Excellent tips! I do a lot of these already, but the five added tips are very useful. Especially about writing quality content. I just have one question.
The Google sandbox isn’t actually a thing, more of an explanation for why new sites don’t rank as well because being new, they lack authority. So I’m wondering where you got the six month figure?
As far as I know, there isn’t an actual time limit, more a general guide. Plus I’m on page one position two for a keyword and my site is only three months old and one of my pages got indexed yesterday, 12 hours after posting it and I hadn’t had time to submit the new URL to Search Console yet though it does have my sitemap, but that was the fastest ever.
I will have to find the article about Google Sandbox being more a general concept to explain the lack of authority to new sites than an actual thing. But still, great article! Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge with us!
Hi Selenity, I explain in this article that the sandbox isn’t officially mentioned by any blog from Google, but I assure you, it is real. Every single SEO expert I talk to says it’s real.
You can call lack of website authority, website maturity, and whatever other terms, but until the site gets to a point where it’s called these things, it’s positioning in Google is limited, hindered and that’s where the sandbox term comes from.
Now the reason I said 6 months is because after running various sites in competitive markets, here is what I have seen:
1) For sites which target niche topics and/or keywords with very little competition, they can get ranked fast and high. The problem is that both these things don’t really get much search traffic, so while the good rankings hit quickly, there’s no traffic coming in from them on the back end.
For example, I run a travel site and certain places I list that I’ve visited (It is a keyword in this case) have no search traffic and really no other sites attempting to rank for the same keyword, so I have found that my site gets high rankings for that type of term quickly, even though it’s still new and not an authority page.
I suspect the example you mentioned fits into this particular example.
2) For niche sites and topics that have little-medium competition and for the keyword, there is a sandbox period, but it’s about 3 months. I experienced this on 2 sites I had and after 3 months, I did see rankings improve substantially.
3) And finally, for niche topics that are competitive, I find that I need to post a lot more and be in the sandbox for a lot longer. This site just recently started seeing more traffic come in and wouldn’t you know it, it happened around 6 months after I started it.
And I have other sites, also in other, similarly competitive niches, that also start seeing results after 6 months.
And it’s not just my experiences which showcase these range. The same SEO experts I talk to, also confirm that the sites they run in similar niche topics also see the same types of waiting periods with their sites to come out of the sandbox.
And finally, to summarize, I can tell you that within the first 2 months, even if you blog every single day and optimize every post as best as you can for SEO, that the rankings for that work will not kick in until after the site is out of the sandbox.
But it is very important that while it’s in it, that you do invest into building it, so when it’s out, all that work will then finally start to pay you back in rankings and good traffic.
Thanks for another great post! I will definitely try to implement all the methods you are suggesting in this post since my SEO still needs a little work 🙂
One question: How do you do the 10th point (Fetch As Google on it)? I’ve never heard of this method before! Can you please elaborate a bit more on this?
Thanks!
Marios
I linked to the tutorial above in one of the extra 5 points Marios, but here is the link to explain how to use that tool. Basically you manually tell Google to crawl your content and this can lead to faster ranking.
Thanks Vitaliy,
I tried it in my new blog post. I think it worked. I’m waiting for the post to be indexed.
Marios
No problem, but I wouldn’t even wait for the index, just fetch it.
Hi, being fairly new as an online marketer, your first 10 tips will be very helpful for now. I now understand for the first time that I should not expect to rank on Google since I am still in the sandbox. Thank you so much for that information. I will be applying the rest of your suggestions when I get out of the sandbox.
I do have a question for you: Is Google fetch, or what they call Google Crawl in the new search console version? Since, I am very new to this, I don’t seem to have access to the old webmaster tools.
Thank you,
Martine
Martine hi, firstly, your site and your content will be ranked on Google when the site is still in the sandbox, but it won’t be ranked high because of that same effect, not until you are out of it. Expect rankings within this period to be on page 3 and under and to rise above that post sandbox.
Now regarding using Google fetch, there is a new console, but the old one is still available until the end of March, you just have to look for the menu option that says it (look at your site within Webmaster Tools and in the menus to the left, it should be the lowest option).
When the new console becomes official, I will be showing how to use that one for fetching.
I will have to remember to wait out the newer blog posts. I start looking at everything and I get anxious. You know how it goes :).
I haven’t done YouTube videos yet, but I’d like to try that at some point. Thanks again for your advice!
No problem, remember even when you pass the sandbox period, the posts you created within it still have to go through their own ranking process, it’s just that without the sandbox, now they have less lag in that and you should see faster results, but any new content you put up can still take it’s own time to rank high still.
However, the better authority the domain and site has, the faster you’ll notice the rankings rise, believe me. The goal is to get to a point where the site can get high rankings in days and even sooner and this is totally possible if the authority is high enough. Following these 15 methods I mentioned and also frequently blogging, will definitely help make this possible Christina.
I love this post so much because my site is now 6 months old, and I’m going through and seeing which posts are tanking and trying to figure out how to improve them. So this is perfect timing for me!
There is one situation I’m having that you mentioned and I wanted to see if there’s anything else I can do to improve it. I wrote a blog post called What is XYZ? And it’s ranking for XYZ review. But in the 8th spot. It’s getting a lot of impressions, but being in the 8th spot, the CTR is not great.
I went in and changed the meta title and description (I know I can’t change the permalink), but is there anything else I can change to help increase the ranking for XYZ review? Should I change image tags, H3 titles and things like that, or will that hurt me in some way?
I love reading all of your advice, Vitaliy. You’re keeping me on track!
Hi Christina, here’s the thing, if you change your meta title now, it will cause it to lose the spot and go through the ranking process again (but faster this time). If you’re going to change anything on a post that’s already on the first page, ONLY add new content to the post. That will make sure the spiders don’t need to reindex anything and you will keep your rankings.
Regarding CTR, how long has this post been in this spot since AFTER your site passed through the sandbox? It’s entirely possible that it’s still too early to see this post hit higher positions and more time needs to pass. So if this is the case, I’d wait.
One thing you can do is add a YouTube video and link to the post review like I mentioned in one of the methods above. Another is getting more comments on the page to show Google that you’re getting good feedback. These should at the very least help the ranking rise up.
I do have a question: How do you suggest one manages the internal links when you are just building your website. Do you suggest you go back once you have things to link to?
The other question is with the new webmaster’s tool, I can’t seem to find the fetch function.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Carmen & Ben, yes you are right about making internal links after you have a good deal of content to interlink between. As for Webmaster Tools, it’s still there (it might move into the new tool at the end of March), but you have to click on “go to the old console” at the bottom of your webmaster tools menu to find the crawl and fetch tool that I use.
If it ceases to exist at the end of this month, I will be updating how to use the fetch tool through the new updated method.