My website doesn't rank high in search engines

Great content will pay off. Google and other search engines are now doing a great job in punishing websites which try to rank high with "black hat" techniques, but they also reward sites which do create great content.

Search engines love content. A lot of content = a lot of traffic. But how to offer unique content on your website without stealing, and without spending a lot of time (or money) to create some? 

Fortunately, sometimes there is free content out there which is up for grabs. Frequently organizations or institutions who are not internet-savvy don't know that the content they have could be put online (or made directly accessible to search engines, i.e. not hidden in a database). 

For example, imagine you're a new website for lawyers. What information might be out there which is not directly accessible on websites today? Maybe there is some government database with tons lawsuits, with a description of the lawsuit and the outcome etc. Maybe it's even accessible via the web, but only through a search form (so search engines don't crawl that data). Approach the governmental body in charge and ask them if you can use the data and make it accessible to users in a userfriendly form. Maybe they agree to it - why shouldn't they? They may also have an interest in their content getting found.

Make sure that the content you own is not hidden in some databases where it is only accessible after users entered a search request. Put the content online so that search engines can crawl and index it, and subsequently send traffic to your site. 

One example for this is Facebook: user profiles used to be "behind the curtain", i.e. only accessible to users who are logged in. More and more content is now publicly accessible - for exactly this reason. 

Maybe you don't have the right regional focus? Maybe your concept/idea works better in a different country? 

A tool which allows you to easily offer your site in 90 languages is Google Translate. 

Note: this is also a good strategy for SEO (Search engine optimization) as you'll have content then in many different languages - without putting any effort into it. 

In addition to applying the other solutions for this problem, be patient. Google and other search engines are very sceptical regarding new sites, so they don't rank them high in the beginning. 

How many sites (and esp. how many high-quality sites) link to your site is a key factor which determines your ranking in google and other search engines. Therefore you should always seek to get high-quality links to your site. 

There are various strategies to achieve this. A well-structured longlist can be found here.

Just like you (should), other websites are constantly seeking to get unique content on their site, to increase their readership and enhance their ranking in search engines. Therefore many allow guest posting, i.e. where guests provide an article and are permitted to place one or two links back to their site in return. 

A service for which guest blogging made all the difference is Buffer (read their story here). 

Search for high-ranking websites in your niche and ask them if you could write a guest post for them. Not all accept guest posts - you'll see that if you check who is posting on their site. A longlist of high-traffic sites which allow guest posting can be found here. 

Search engines track which websites get updated and which don't, and reward / punish them accordingly in the rankings.

Therefore make sure new content gets added to your website(s). It doesn't have to come from you - if you develop a good strategy which makes your users / visitors provide comments then it also does the job (and you don't have any work). 

This is important for two reasons:

1. Search engines need to know what your site is about (obviously) and the title tags give them an important clue.
   
   
2. The title tag will show up in the search results. If people don't click on it (i.e. a low 'click-through-rate') search engines will punish your site, because they aim to display only the most relevant content to users, and if users don't click on it, search engines see that as an indicator that your content is not relevant - and your ranking goes down.
   
   

See a detailed description of how to give your websites proper title tags on MOZ. 

If you generated good content, you can leverage it by putting it - in slightly modified versions - on websites which have a high standing in search engines, e.g. you could: 

• Create a presentation (slides) of your content and upload it on Slideshare, a very popular stie for slides & presentations
• Create a short video about it and upload on Youtube
• Phrase your content as an answer to a question on Quora
• Paste your content as a solution to a problem on Solutionbay ;)

This will give your content more and quicker exposure than (only) pasting it on your website. 

See a detailed description of this on SearchEngineWatch

Although search engines only understand text, they do recognize the existence videos and pictures, and often regard a mix of several different content types as possibly more informative than text-only, and reward it accordingly in the rankings. 

Links to other (high-quality) sites signals that you are (or at least consider yourself to be) in a good neighborhood, which is usually rewarded by search engines. 

However, if you link too much search engines may see this as a sign that you don't have a lot of relevant content on your site (that's why you have to send your visitors to many other sites) so your ranking will suffer. 

Search engines know that ads negatively impact the user experience, which they reflect in their rankings. 

If you manage to get links to your site, make sure that they are descriptive, e.g. a site linking to you with the anchor text (= text in the link) such as "Check out this great site to find solutions to all your problems" is not as valuable as "Check out Solutionbay, the no.1 site to find solutions to all your problems."

One way search engines assess the quality of your site is by how long people stay there. If visitors bounce very shortly after they came to your site (e.g. from a search result page) then search engines see this as an indicator of low quality content on your site.

Vice versa, if you succeed to engage people and make them browse many of your sites (not only the 'landing page' where they entered) then that wil have a positive effect on your rankings. 

Getting links from blogs-only (as an example...) is by far not as powerful as getting a mix of links from blogs, newspapers, social media and so on. So try to get a diversified link profile. 

Search engines are getting smarter every day... and they figured out a long time already that a link from the content area of a site is a much more powerful statement than a link from the footer.

So try to get your links into the heart of the sites' content which link to you. 

If no links are pointing to your site, search engines may never find it and therefore not index it. 

So ensure links point to your site, or (which you should do in any case), create a Sitemap which is a list of links to all of the pages on your site, and then submit that sitemap to search engines. 

For example, learn how to submit your sitemap to Google. 

The H1, H2, H3 tags tell search engines something about the structure of your page (i.e. headings and sub-headings) and are therefore a must-have in on-site-optimization. 

The video below gives a good introduction: 

You've probably seen it before: some websites have more information displayed in search results than only the title and snippet of their page. For example, some have a picture, or a review (1-5 stars). 

This additional information is called "Rich snippets" and it increases conversion significantly. You only need to tweak your pages slightly to have those displayed. Read more about it on SearchEngineLand.

If you don't have a blog yet, then consider starting one. It's a great way to get into the habit of producing regular content, which will build up over time, getting you nice traffic from search engines as well as from other sites linking to it (provided your content is good!). 

If you're struggling with ideas what to write about, check out the solutions for "I don't know what to write about".

One of the key reasons why Youtube managed to get so popular is due to a clever tactic they applied: they made it possible for other users to embed their videos on other websites, therefore spreading their content much faster than it would have been possible otherwise. 

Think how you can do the same. For example, did you create an interesting graphic which others would want to show on their websites too? Add a code below the graphic which others can use to embed it on their site. 

They get interesting content, you get a link back - everybody wins. 

Writing attention-grabbing headlines may not improve your site's ranking in search engines, but it has a strong influence on people clicking it (or not), so it's just as important. 

Therefore be aware that: 

• Headlines which include numbers are twice more likely to get clicked on
• Odd-numbered headlines have a 20% higher click-through-rate than headlines with even numbers
• Headlines using [brackets] have a 38% higher click rate (based on an analysis of 3m headlines by Outbrain)

Some websites try to rank for 100's of keywords. The result: they rank for none. 

Pick two or three keywords to focus on. Brian Dean picked only a few keywords to focus on, which helps him to rank for many long-tail combinations. His blog has only 21 posts, but it gets more thank 100k visitors every month. 

See this great list of copywriting tips. 

Https is a quality indicator for google and other search engines. So switch to https, buying a security certificate is cheap these days. 

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