The most important SEO ranking factors you need to know

  • -

The most important SEO ranking factors you need to know

Here, the Google ranking factor really matters to lift those businesses up. You can find lots of information floating around these days regarding the website rank. Google ranking factors offer webmasters, Search Engine Optimisation and content marketer with the recent insight about essential ranking factors for high ranking search results.

To be clear, Google features a very complex ranking algorithm and will take account of more than 200 different ranking factors. However, back in 2016, so quite recently, Google basically confirmed its top three ranking factors: Link Profile, Content quality, and User Experience metrics.

1. Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important part of the search algorithm. With this, they are also one of the most misunderstood. Backlinks are other website owners that mention another websites domain, by creating a link to your websites content. Many website owners use these links to their advantage. When you have multiple backlinks from high-authority domains, your chances to ranking higher raises substantially for your targeted keywords.

Backlinks might sound great, but there are many things that can cause havoc and put you in trouble. Google explains that backlinks calculate a link score. This score is calculated by examining every incoming link to your website by the other websites quality score (aka PageRank) and the number of links to the site.

Link quantity is very important for Google, but more importantly is the quality of the link you are receiving to your site. You need to focus on gaining high domain authority sites that have many high quality linking domains. When creating or asking for backlinks, stay away from spammy, low quality websites. If Google finds you on too many spammy sites, your rankings can drop substantially, and at times, your website can get de-indexed from Google.

Also, if you outsource any backlink project to someone else, you need to know if they will not add you into a load of low quality, spammy sites. You must trust this individual by doing some research on their work. Some backlinks are so spammy that they can throw your whole backlink profile on Googles blacklist, eventually leading to a Google penalty.

We can think of inbound links or backlinks as the vote of confidence in the digital world. When a website links to your content, they are saying that your page is reliable, credible, and trustworthy. When the link is coming from a relevant, high-quality website, it’s like getting a recommendation letter from a famous person in your industry (read: it’s very valuable).

Nowadays the quality of the backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time might get your site penalized by Google.

While inbound links are the most important of the three, that’s not saying outbound links and internal links are not important:

– Outbound links and proper internal linking structure can help improve your site’s relevance. Linking to an authoritative site, for example, can tell Google that you are a legitimate content creator for a specific topic. A proper internal linking practice can also help Google with the indexation process.
– Proper external links essentially tell Google about the niche/industry you are in, the topic you are covering, the potential competitors, and so on. In short, you are helping the search engines to index and structure the whole internet.
– Linking to relevant content (that is already ranking) can provide additional value for your audience (which can indirectly affect ranking).
– When you link to others, you let the other party notice your site and your content. In the future, they might return the favor and link your content. In short, this can be the start of a fruitful relationship.

2. Quality Content

The quality of your content is the center of your SEO, period. No amount of SEO optimizations and state-of-the-art strategy can help low-quality content. Think of SEO as a way to amplify the performance of high-quality and relevant content and not the other way around.

In the past, SEO content is solely about optimizing the content for the target keywords, and thus we aim for a certain keyword density. It’s very important to understand that today, SEO is no longer solely about keyword optimization.

Instead, the most important thing to focus on is whether your content can meet the user’s search intent. In general, there are four different types of search intent:

– Informational intent. The user is simply looking for information. For example, a user might look for information about SEO by using the “what is SEO” search query. In this case, we can provide educational or informational content to meet this user’s needs.
– Transactional intent. Here, the user is searching for a product/service with the intention to buy. Nowadays, however, people might search directly on Amazon when they have transactional intent. This intent is usually identified when the user uses “buy” in their query.
– Comparison and Investigation. The user has the intention to buy in the future or is considering to make the purchase by comparing different products/services, check for online reviews, etc. When a user uses queries like “compare” or “review”, it is a strong sign they are having this intent.
– Navigational intent. Users with this intent are trying to get to a specific website. For example, we might type “Instagram” in the search bar for convenience’s sake.

User can have all four of these search intents with various queries, so it’s very important to develop a wide variety of content to cover all of these intents.

Google is getting better and better at recognizing how content can cater to a specific intent. Google BERT, the latest algorithm update, allows Google to better understand the context of long-tail, complex queries.

Content optimization for SEO is a very complex subject, but in general, it’s about being better than the other ranking content. Do a quick Google search of your target keyword (more on this later), and analyze the top-ranking pages (if possible, analyze all pages featured on the first page of the SERP). We generally have two options:

– Develop a better, longer, more in-depth content than these competitors.
– Be different, and cover the keyword from a unique angle.

Which one is easier? In most cases—if the opportunity presents itself—, being unique is relatively easier, but not saying it’s easy.

Content quality and relevance are extremely related to backlinks (as discussed above). Good content will always get linked, sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content that is not relevant to get authoritative backlinks.

important SEO ranking factors

3. User Experience Metrics

To reiterate, Google search’s mission is to provide relevant and reliable search results for its user, and the Google search algorithm is constantly being improved to achieve this mission.

One of Google’s major improvements in accordance with this objective is the introduction of Google RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s first AI-based algorithm that is launched in 2016, and with its machine learning capability, Google is now getting better at measuring and recognizing these user-experience metrics in real-time:

– Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors that leave your site after viewing just one page (single page visit). It can be after one second or one hour, what matters is they leave after just a single page.
– Dwell time: that is, how long a visitor spends on your site. They can view just one page or 100 pages, but this metric is about the total time spent.
– Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users that click on SERP results and visit the website

These three metrics combined, essentially provide Google with the information whether your site is relevant for the user, according to the user’s search query and search intent.

4. Increase page speed

Mobile page speed is an official ranking factor. As much as 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. All this once again proves that site speed should be among the top concerns for website owners.

To ensure your site performs well, regularly check your pages’ load time and performance with Google’s PageSpeed Insights or any other third-party tools. They will help detect what slows your site down and recommend how to correct speed issues.

Make sure none of your content elements hamper your pages load. Consider resizing large images, eliminating slowing elements or those that are not supported by mobile browsers (like Flash, for example).

5. Mobile performance

Even though it’s closely connected with user experience, I believe this topic deserves a separate paragraph.

Google tends to rank higher the websites that perform better. Moreover, since the introduction of mobile-first indexing, as well as Google’s Mobile Speed Update, mobile websites performance has officially become a significant ranking factor.

Remember, all things mobile became possible due to the increased use of smartphones. To remain the top search engine, Google had to match the changed user behavior. So now Google’s crawling, indexing, and ranking systems are prioritizing mobile site versions over desktop. And this is what you should do to ensure your website meets the new reality.

Related content 5 clever SEO tatics to speed up website ranking

_______________________________________________________________________________

Please contact us for seo service packages at TDHSEO.COM.

TDHSEO Team

Email: tdhseo@gmail.com
Skype: tdhseo
https://www.facebook.com/tdhseo

Thank you!


  • -

Everything about SEO strategies you should create

Category : Seo Consulting

Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users

One of the big misconceptions about SEO is that it’s all about tricking Google to get your website to rank high.

Again, it’s important to consider Google’s mission.  They want to organize all the information online and present it to the searcher so that only the best websites are at the top of the results page.

With that in mind, the goal of SEO is to make it as easy as possible for Google to find your website (by using proper HTML code, writing relevant copy, designing for ease of use, optimizing page load speed) and then to give Google a reason to rank your website higher than all the other relevant websites (by publishing better and more robust information, getting more links, more online PR).

Think Mobile

The number of people using mobile devices has increased in number over the past few years. With Google moving to a mobile-first search index soon, and the fact that a majority of Google searches are done through mobile, your mobile page would soon become your main page. This means that your website must be optimized for mobile as soon as possible.

How to apply: The first thing that you should do to your website is to apply responsive design into your website. This improves the user experience through better navigation, which means users will stay in your website longer. This can be done by changing your website’s code to comply with the adjustment from mobile to desktop. You can also create your own AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) website as well, as this helps improve performance and loading speed.

Create More Video Content

Nowadays, it is much more common to see internet users access more video content compared to blogs and images. This means that video content has now become more important than ever, with other users having the tendency to search on Youtube before even going to Google. When it comes to the amount of searches, Youtube is already the second largest search engine, and your website would surely benefit with having some video content.

How to apply: Do some research on what the users prefer to watch, and see how you can create videos that they can connect with. Video creation and production is a different thing in of itself, and requires some good video and sound equipment to pull off. It is also important to make your videos SEO-friendly, as Google shows Youtube videos in their search results.

Security

According to WPHacked, “In 2020, small business cybersecurity is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.”

Plus, 70% of all featured snippets are on sites that have adopted HTTPS. So take it seriously!

Every page on your site should be secured with an SSL certificate.

Chrome now shows a warning for all sites that are not secured by an SSL certificate, and in some cases it won’t even render pages that do not.

Imagine if you are researching products on a website and you received a warning saying the site wasn’t secure.

You would probably think twice about making a trusting that information or visiting again, right? You definitely don’t want to create that same doubt for your own website visitor.

Make sure all of your URLs resolve to HTTPS (rather than HTTP).

If they don’t, those pages are not secure. If you haven’t already taken care of this, it can cost you with search engines and with your visitors because people will not put as much trust in your content.

Voice search is pacing up at the exponential rate

The use of voice search option is growing very rapidly.

This option has provided the feasibility to even those users who were unable to make searches earlier.

But now they can easily make searches using their voice.

We can easily notice that now voice search also holds a good percentage in total searches.

Therefore, this is the demand of the situation that voice search optimization must also be considered while SEO.

This will help to target those users also who are making searches using their voice.

As in SEO keywords are used to get the relevant and quality traffic.

In the same manner, to optimize the voice search, conversational keywords are used.

Voice search optimization will help to improve the website ranking for voice searches.

Have you ever thought that will your website appear in the searches made using the voice?

If not…then think about it.

It may be or maybe not.

But with voice search optimization you can make your website appear for voice search also.

If the website consists of conversational keywords then it is more likely to appear in the search results.

Even Google is also quite concerned about the future of voice searches.

As now search engines will provide accurate information just by understanding the intent of the voice search.

SEO strategies

A local strategy

Local searches that include “near me” or “close by” have increased by 900% in recent years. That is a lot of people looking for information locally.

Of those searches, 88% of local business searches on a mobile device resulted in either a call or a visit to the business within 24 hours.

This could mean big bucks!

If you are a local business, you’ll want to optimize your online properties, including your website and social media pages, to show up for those searches.

Be sure that all of your online properties are consistent with your name, address, and phone number. Your website should also have this information displayed on the footer of each page on your site.

In a similar vein, have you paid attention to your Google My Business listing?

If you are a local business, you should maximize your Google My Business listing and update it regularly. Be sure to add pictures, video, and posts.

Question-focused content

Creating content that answers the questions your prospects are asking is a crucial search strategy.

It will help you with search engines and it may help you get featured snippets, which can increase your traffic.

Your content should answer the most pressing questions that your audience has. For example, no matter what someone is buying, whether it’s a pack of gum or a car, they want to know about price.

At IMPACT, we refer to these core topics as “The Big 5.” These topics are the ones that can affect your bottom line.

Make sure any content you produce is 80% educational (answering questions) and only 20% promotional.

Lengthy content is one of the tricks to add value to the users

Many times the length of the content is not taken seriously but it somewhere affects the ranking of the website.

It has been observed that content which contains word count between 1500-2000 has a better ranking in comparison to the content with less than 1500 words.

It doesn’t mean that short content does not rank well.

Just the thing is Long content is written in a very detailed way.

Therefore, it covers a wide range of topics and provides diverse information must on one platform.

Such content helps to add more value to the users.

Such kind of content is more likely to be displayed in SERP by Google.

Lengthy content generally contains more keywords.

Ultimately, driving the content to rank for more than one keywords.

And one cannot get out of this fact that better ranking means better visibility.

As a result, better visibility ends up with more clicks and conversions.

Related post How to optimize image for SEO

_______________________________________________________________________________

Please contact us for seo service packages at TDHSEO.COM.

TDHSEO Team

Email: tdhseo@gmail.com
Skype: tdhseo
https://www.facebook.com/tdhseo

Thank you!