Knowing what search engine ranking factors determine your website popularity is more important than ever. This knowledge will allow you to fully understand your search engine ranking. The higher you rank on a search engine, the more views you get on your site. Having a higher visibility on your site will give you the opportunity to grow your site through backlinks, large communities, and revenue. In this article, you will learn what search engine ranking factors are, the most important ones to think about, and how to optimize them to their full potential.
Table of Contents
What are Search Engine Ranking Factors?
Ranking systems are what search engines use in order to filter through all the information available on the internet. Search engines, like Google, use systems made up of a series of algorithms that look at different factors. Over 200 factors apply, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and your location and settings. The weight that is applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query. For example, the more recent content plays a larger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.
SEO Ranking Factors
Ranking factors are a part of SEO (search engine optimization), which is the process of optimizing your website to rank as high as possible in organic search engine results. The term “organic” refers to search results that are unpaid. This is in contrast to pay-per-click advertising. Both paid and organic rankings on Google use algorithms. Even though the different factors and algorithms shift sometimes, Google’s main focus is trustworthiness, quality, and performance. These ranking factors play an important role in users having quality answers to their questions every time they use a search engine. They also give you and your site guidelines to follow, as well as the opportunity to increase your rankings.
Types of Ranking Factors
There are three different types of ranking factors. They are off-page, on-page, and technical. Off-page ranking factors are being measured by Google elsewhere from your site, and primarily involve backlinks. On-page ranking factors are mainly related to the keywords and informational quality of your pages. Technical ranking factors are measured on your site, but focus more on its overall performance as a whole, rather than individual pages.
Major Search Engine Ranking Factors
Your ranking on a search engine is determined by over 200 different factors used in an algorithm. If you are interested in optimizing your ranking, it’s important to look at the most prominent ranking factors.
Backlinks
Backlinks remain the most important ranking factor for their pages. Your links have to come from a variety of high authority websites that are similar to yours, black hat SEO strategies are too risky to use. Black hat SEO violates search engine guidelines while also ignoring the experience for users. These tactics exploit loopholes in Google’s algorithm, and if you use these tactics, your site runs the risk of losing your ranking every time there is a new algorithm update. Some Google patents also say that freshness and traffic may also be important backlink metrics.
Saturation
Your content on your site should contain an appropriate amount of relevant keywords, entities, and images for the length of the copy. Avoid being too wordy! Your content should be a natural sounding copy written in an informative style.
HTML tags
HTML tags tell Google which parts of your copy are the most important. The title and meta description tags are what users see in search results. Heading tags split your copy into sections, and alt text describes images to search engines. Alt text is always important to fill out! You can use it to add more keywords, too.
Mobile Optimization
In September of 2020, Google announced that all websites rank as per their mobile version (not the desktop version). If you want your website to rank well in search results, make sure that it is designed for mobile users. Having your website optimized for mobile users gives you more opportunity. Users can see your site on phones and tablets, not just on desktops. This can be exceptionally helpful if you have an E-Commerce website.
How to Optimize Search Engine Ranking Factors
Optimizing your search engine ranking factors will allow you to take full advantage of the knowledge of these rankings. Knowing what the rankings are is important, but it’s also important to know how to optimize them in a way that is beneficial to your site.
Backlinks
The most efficient way to grow your backlink profiles is to borrow backlink ideas from your search competitors. To do this, go to the SEO SpyGlass and add a few of your top competitors. From there, this tool will analyze your competitors’ backlinks and find the backlink gap. A backlink gap is a website that links to your competitors, but not you. These are the websites that you should focus on and reach out too. Since they already link to other websites in your niche, they are likely to host your links as well.
Keywords
It can be difficult to figure out exactly which keywords to use, where to put them, and how many of them you need. A good strategy for this is to create a benchmark. Do this by analyzing your search competitors’ top ranking, found in Website Auditor. From here, enter your main keyword and you get a detailed list of SEO writing instructions. The SEO Content Editor tool tells you the right amount of main and secondary keywords, placement, and recommended length of the copy.
HTML Tags
Be mindful of HTML tags! There is a possibility that hundreds of pages on your website are not properly optimized for search. Use Website Auditor and review your pages in bulk for a thorough approach. First, you go to Site Structure > Pages > On-page and sort pages by their search optimization score. Then, look for any pages with a low score and click on them for a detailed report on exactly which HTML tags are in need of optimization and what’s wrong with them.
Mobile Optimization
In order to see if your page is mobile friendly, simply visit Google’s mobile friendly test, and submit a URL. If your page is mobile friendly, you will get a green light, and if not, you will get some suggestions on what to improve. Checking your website page by page is not practical, so using the Google Search Console to check all your pages at once will be much more efficient.
Importance of Optimizing Ranking Factors
Search engine optimization will help you improve your website rank, which will affect traffic, clicks, and revenue. Using a website audit, which is a full analysis of factors that affect your site visibility on search engines, will give you the opportunity to grow your business online. The audit will outline your strengths and weaknesses of your SEO strategy as well as offer potential solutions. These solutions will improve the accessibility and web visibility of your site. Audits will reveal any errors in your site that make it difficult for search engines to show your website in their results. The audit will cover keyword usage, organize search ranking, indexing, and even backlinks in and out of your website. Using a tool like this gives you a comprehensive list of what you need done to have the most successful website possible. It is also important to do this regularly so you are always up to date with algorithm changes.
Building Credibility
Having a search engine optimized website also builds trust and credibility with your users. If you have a strong foundation for a website with a clean and effective user experience, you have a higher chance of users going back to your site again and again. You will also gain authority, which will boost your rankings with search engines like Google and be higher up on their results page. Establishing your brand as an authority takes patience, effort, and commitment, while also relying on offering a valuable, quality product that allows your customers to trust your brand. If your customers trust your brand, they will not only revisit your site and become a loyal customer, they will also recommend your brand to people they know. This will give you a larger audience and continued growth in the long run, which is imperative to having a successful website.
FAQs
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