Understanding your Search Engine Ranking
One area that I focus a lot of time to (on this site and others) is SEO and my overall search engine ranking. I really do believe search engine marketing and social media marketing go hand in hand with each other.
Analyse your websites SEO and look at the following 7 critical points to SEO success.
- Authority and Trust of your Domain
- Link popularity of your homepage and other pages in your site
- Anchor Text of external links to your site
- On Page Keyword usage
- Website Speed/ Hosting quality
- Traffic, Click through data, bounce rate etc
- Social signals
So today I will analyse this site with you, to give you a better idea how to understand your search engine rankings.
1. Authority/ Trust of Domain
I think it’s reasonable to say that Google, Bing and Yahoo trust my site. If i goto each search engine and search socialmedianews.com.au I show up. Simple hey.
According to Google my PageRank is 4 out of 10. This is decent for a site that’s only been around for just under 2 years. Every quarter Google updates your PageRank and if you are consistently rising that is good sign.
2. Link Popularity
You will notice on every article I have a Link to this Article section at the bottom of each post which shows off some HTML code allowing people to link to my site. Whilst this doesn’t exactly look all that attractive and not relevant to a majority of users, it does make it easy for people to link to me – and I’ve noticed people consistently using this feature.
I’ve also spent considerable time getting links to the homepage of the site.
3. Anchor Text from External Websites
One keyword I am particularly interested in ranking for is: Social Media
This is a very broad term and with it comes serious competition (for example from Social Media agencies, SEO companies etc all around Australia). Even on google.com.au the competition is strong. I worked hard to get numerous quality links from other sites with the anchor text Social Media.
Did it pay off? Yes. I am now the number 1 ranking Australian site on google.com.au when you search: Social Media
Really? Yes… Try for yourself, and see the screenshot below:
(Yes I am logged out, clear cache/ history etc)
Now I am trying to figure out how to outrank Wikipedia, but that doesn’t seem like an easy task 🙂 I will keep trying though.
4. On Page Keyword Usage
As per point 3, I want to rank for a very broad term – social media. In almost every article I will mention this keyword phrase, and I make sure to do this in a way that is relevant to the article.
5. Website Speed/ Hosting
This website is designed for an Australian audience. Therefore I host this site on a VPS in one of Australia’s best data centres. From my tests this site is generally fairly fast from whatever location I load the site from (work, home, friends place etc).
Uptime is also crucial and I have an uptime metre at the bottom right (in the footer) of every page. Over the last month my uptime has been 99.91% which equates to only a couple minutes downtime. In my case hosting on a shared server in the USA would not be the best experience for my users or search engines.
6. Website Traffic/ Click Through Rate/ Bounce Rate
I am now getting 20,000-25,000 Unique Visitors to the site every month, and I have placed a number of call to actions on each page to encourage users to click around, thus lowering my bounce rate.
7. Social Signals
Well this is a social media blog after all, so I have heavily integrated social media icons on the site. Particularly at the top and bottom of each post, and in the sidebar. I think I am doing everything I can do to encourage social sharing of my content.
What Next?
So for today – why don’t you analyse each of these 7 points on your own website.
How do you stack up? What do you need to improve?
