Most of us have a love-hate relationship with Google. We use it every day and it’s amazing. But trying to figure out what you need to do on your website so that your content get’s found on Google? Totally overwhelming. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a science of it’s own and it’s a little bit complex, there’s no way around it. But there’s no need to give up completely. Just doing a few things can already help you get better results on Google.

1. Improve Your Titles and Descriptions

When your website shows up on the results page on Google, do your page title and description invite people to click and visit your page? Improving your titles and descriptions will not only help you get more clicks directly, it will also improve your Google ranking. That’s because Google ranks websites higher that have a better click-through-rate on Google search results. So if more people who see your page on the results page actually click on your link, you’ll not only get those clicks, you’ll also might rank better in the future. Double-win!

There are some very specific things you can do to optimize your title and descriptions:

• Use a short, concise title that includes your keyword. Your description should also include your keyword
• Include the current month or year in your title. People are looking for the most up-to-date information. For example if you’re offering a yoga retreat, add month and year to your title.
• Titles using phrases like “step-by-step” or “how-to” usually have greater appeal than the mere mention of how to do something.

If you’re using WordPress for your website you can edit your title and descriptions with the YOAST SEO plugin.

2. Add Internal Links

Internal links are links within your website. So you’re linking from one blog post or page on your site to another one. They are super useful because not only allow they your website visitors to navigate your content, but they’ll also add link juice (Google ranking power), so they can help your ranking in the Google search results.

But don’t just add any links. You should only include links that are helpful to your readers and that fit in naturally within your content. For example when you’re writing a blog post about yin yoga, you could add a link to an older post with a yin yoga play list. When a user sees an informative link like this that truly matches the context of the content, they are more likely to click on that link. This provides real value and improves your user engagement.

You don’t need tons of links in your internal content; simply add as many as you have that would be beneficial to your reader. Of course it really helps if you have lots of content that you can link to. If you only have about 5 pages, this will be challenging. This is one of the reasons why I always recommend to add a blog to your yoga website.

3. Fix 404-Errors And Broken Links

Broken links and 404 errors signal Google two things: your site is poorly maintained and Google’s users are more likely to bump into broken pages. As a result, Google assumes your website is simply not being maintained to a high standard, and users would be better served by another site which has better quality content. Oups!

Thankfully 404 errors and broken links are easily fixed, so such problems should be avoided. Outdated links you can simply correct. When you have outdated content that you want to delete, for example for a yoga retreat that’s expired, implement a redirect that will make sure that all search traffic that comes for the old page gets redirected to your new page. This could be the next year yoga retreat or the retreat category page. I use the free plugin Redirection on my WordPress website to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends. You can also run a free analysis on SEM Rush: https://www.semrush.com/

If you haven’t done so yet, sign up for the Google Webmaster Tools right now too. Google Webmaster Tools is a free toolset provided by Google that helps you understand what’s going on with your website. You’ll get an overview of everything from what keywords you are ranking for to how much traffic you are getting from Google. In addition you’ll see if the Google bot is experiencing any crawl errors when going through your website, the number of sites linking to yours, and how many pages Google has indexed.

These are 3 things you can do right now to improve your Google ranking. The most important thing though is to create stellar content. That is the foundation of all search engine optimization. Simply creating the best content out there. The more you do that, the better your Google rankings will be.