Did you know Google has over 200 SEO ranking factors already which is hard to keep up with? They usually keep changing the algorithms on a regular basis which can be difficult to rank your website higher over time. Let’s take a closer look at each factor individually.
Essential SEO Ranking Factors You Must Consider
As we already know, SEO ranking factors are often changing over time. Still, we should be aware of some basic factors all the time. In this blog we will explore some of the most essential and important SEO factors below:
Produce Quality Website Content
You must do thorough keyword research so that you can reach out to your target audience through the language you use. You must know what your target audience is searching for and according to that, you will be using short-tail or long-tail keywords in your content. Having informative, high-quality website content will eventually increase your SEO score.
Create Easily Accessible & Secure Websites
Having the right kind of URL is important for any website owner because when the browser gives an alert of your website being spam or untrustworthy, your audience will bounce back. Moreover, an easily crawlable and accessible website for Google bots is also essential for any website to rank better. The search engines like Google will require you to crawl and track your content page by page to understand what the website is all about.
To have that, you just need a well-coded website with a thorough sitemap. A sitemap is a blueprint of a website that stores all the information about your website in one place. There are multiple sitemap plugins available for WordPress users currently. You can choose any and implement it on your website.
Maintain A Quality Website Loading Speed
This SEO ranking factor is important because it can determine the success rate of your website overall. Several research indicates that an online visitor waits up until three seconds before your website completely loads. So based on this information, your website must load within seconds or you will lose your potential customer or audience.
The main motto of Google was to provide a better user experience. So while your website is ensuring to have a better speed in loading, Google will rank your website better in the search result. So your website’s loading speed is an important and essential SEO ranking factor that we are looking for.
Create Device-Friendly Websites
Nowadays people are using multiple devices to access any website. So having a device-friendly website that loads fast can be an important checkbox for you. For example, you might have a theme set for your website already. If someone accesses your website through their mobile phone and the whole theme of your website breaks down, he will not be able to find anything from your website.
As a result, you will permanently lose a potential customer or an audience just for not having a device-friendly website. There is also a record of websites that are completely inaccessible through different devices. To avoid this circumstance, you can create device-friendly websites to have a better SEO ranking overall.
Optimize Your On-Page SEO Factors
The way you optimize your website’s on-page content can have a direct impact on your SEO ranking. Let’s see which components you must have to ensure on-page SEO quality.
📌 Using keywords in your title tag: One of the most important relevancy indicators is using keywords in your title tag. The tag’s purpose is to provide a detailed description of the page’s content. It is used by search engines to show the main title of a search result. By including a keyword, the search engine will know what to rank the page for. When the focus keyword appears at the beginning of the title, it automatically boosts the SEO performance of your website.
📌 Keywords in meta descriptions: Using keywords in your meta description is also a good practice to maintain a good SEO score. It’s also important for on-page SEO search result pages. When you add keywords in your meta description, it makes your content more relevant to the searchers.
📌 Maintain a certain content length: When you are producing content for your website, you need to maintain a certain level of word count or length to have a better SEO impact. When your content is at least 800+ words, your content should be good enough to rank better. In that way, your on-page SEO should be secured.
📌 Avoid generating duplicate content: Whenever you can, you need to avoid having duplicate content on your site as it can easily hurt your SEO performance. You need to create original content instead of having the same or duplicate content all over your website.
📌 Optimize each image on your website: Image optimization is another factor that you need to consider. When your website has heavy images that require several seconds to load, it can directly affect your SEO performance. So having a certain size for each image on your site is important for better SEO ranking.
These are some of the many factors that you need to maintain while securing on-page SEO for your website. Besides maintaining quality content, these checklists can enhance the quality of your website as well.
Create Effective Link Structure
Creating an effective link structure is important for search engines to find your website or pages. When you can create a link structure all over the website, it will help you to reach certain goals at a time. The main focus should be on helping your audiences while they are surfing through your website. That means you need to link to content strategically so that they become compelled to check out the link immediately.
Secondly, creating a link flow. Using heatmap or other tools you can detect where the traffic is coming from. Based on that, you can easily create a link flow. Around specific content topics, you can provide useful links that can make the content more logical and relevant. In that way, your users or audience will become more interested and Google will rank your website higher. Overall you must create a user-centric link structure for your website.
Maintain Consistent Company Listing
Brands are rated by search engines like Google, based on their perceived legitimacy, and reliability. Search engines are more likely to improve a brand’s search visibility if it appears to be well-established online. Business listing is an important SEO ranking factor because it helps you appear in local listings. You must have a Google My Business page first, and then create profiles for your company on sector-specific directory websites. Also, your name, address, and contact information must be accessible to everyone. In that way, you can maintain a consistent company listing for a better SEO ranking.
Use Older Domains For Your Websites
Even though no one mentions this in any checklist, your domains can have an impact on your SEO ranking. That means, that if you have an older domain, it will help you rank higher eventually. If you are planning to create a brand new website, with constant SEO work, your site’s search rating will improve over time, but it won’t happen overnight.
Increase User Engagement In Your Website
Search engines rely on users to help them decide which pages to promote in search results. They consider how users interact with results to determine which sites are better and most valuable to searchers. Google achieves this through the usage of RankBrain, an artificial intelligence engine. The following are some of the factors that influence user participation:
CTR: The click-through rate means the rate of people engaging with your website through clicking on different options.
Total Time Spent: How much time your visitors are spending on your website in total.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after just viewing one page of a search engine-generated website.
These measurements help search engines determine whether a search result is useful to visitors, so optimize your site content and search snippets to boost user engagement.
Add Visual Content To Your Content
Visual content can boost your site engagement in a short amount of time. Visitors will be easily drawn to your website if you include content such as images, gifs, or videos that are relevant. They will spend more time on your site, which will increase engagement. Adding media material to your website can aid in the transformation of a static site into a dynamic one. You may quickly develop a high-engaging web page by adding relevant media material to your website. Furthermore, the appearance of your website will be more user-friendly with media content.
Structure Your Website Data For Better SEO
Structured data or schema of your website is important to be maintained. This is one of the most important SEO ranking factors that we must consider. Schema markup or microdata is put to the backend of a website to tell search engines how to categorize and comprehend its content. Structured data is an important SEO ranking factor since it tells search engines exactly what information on a website is relevant. It’s especially essential because structured data can lead to prominent snippets in search, that can increase click-through rates and ranks.
Share Rate Of Social Sharing
Even though the share rate of social media is not a direct SEO ranking factor for your website, still it can bring much traffic to your website. It can eventually increase your overall traffic. Multiple studies have shown that when people share and participate with your material on social media, it can enhance your SERP ranking. On the other hand, more people consuming more content means more opportunities for backlinks.
By now you have already known all the important SEO ranking factors that can make your website rank better. If you find this blog informative enough, you can subscribe to our blog and share your thoughts by joining our friendly community.
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