The way Google ranks the content of a website is not explained in a small article. But I will try to explain the most important.
SEO is marketing! Mostly keyword marketing. To ensure you will get a high Google-ranking, your website-content must be consistent with meta-tags such as title and description.
For example, the title should be direct and for humans understandable. “Direct” means the title is not a word-play, e.g. a florist homepage with the title “colorful spring”. Better would be in this case “fresh flowers” or something similar.
A good description should consists of 2-3 short sentences, but with correct grammar. Google talks English and most other languages. And it checks if you wrote a real sentence that makes sense and agrees with the content of the page. Further, your keywords should be integrated in the sentences of your description.
If your title, description and keywords (not so important any more) are filled in correct, the main keywords integrated in title and description and everything comes back in the actual content of the page, than Google knows this content is real and necessary. This way your Google-ranking will be increased. But still many other factors have to be taken into account when optimizing your page.
For example, Google does not like generated titles and descriptions, especially when they are very similar or even the same. Also, just copying the content from the website in the description is not the way Google likes to see.
Some examples:
If we have a look at a profile-page from a community and let’s say you have always the description:
“This is a profile page from my social network for pet lovers.”
Google will find this sentence with every user’s profile on your site.
So if you have 100 members, Google will have 100 times the same sentence.
Google won’t find this sentence attractive, it will even annoy “him”…
It will think: ‘all your member pages are not interesting’ and will mark your site with duplicated description.
This will be very bad for your site!
If you would write a user name in:
“This is a profile page from ‘name’, one user of my social network for pet lovers”, Google would like this more.
But this sentence is still to similar. Just one word is changing.
In the end Google would mark your site with duplicated description again.
So if you would have a sentence like this:
“This is ‘name’ profile page and he has a ‘pet’. He likes ‘interests’. He comes from ‘…’ and is looking for ‘…’.
Google would love every user profile. Everybody has different pets, hobbies, comes from different places and so on.
In this case Google would mark your profile pages as made from a human. This is real Search-Engine-Optimization.
You see what I want to explain, is not done in a small article…
Such thoughts and more must be done for every page your website contains.
And also for some more factors, you must know the ways Google “thinks” and rates your website.
Title, description and keywords must be reasonable and consistent your actual content!
For communities build with Buddypress, I developed the plugin Seo for Buddypress, to help generating different meta-tags based on the page-content. It gives you the possibility to make a unique meaningful title, description and keywords for all pages and parts of your social network.
You have to think about every part of your website to get the highest ranking possible. The special-tags in the plugin, for example ‘group-name’, ‘user-name’ or ‘event-name’ are your place-holders to generate descriptions from your content.
I hope I could make things a bit more clearly.
If you are thinking about optimizing your homepage, you can contact me here.