One word that pops on everyone’s lips, when they hear that the world’s top search engine (Google) is using more than 200 plus factors for ascertaining the ranking position of a website, is “WOW.”
But strange as that may sound, it is the truth.
The good news, however, is you don’t have to put the same amount of effort into satisfying all the factors because not all of them carry the same weightage. In fact, some of them have become obsolete over time, so much so that they don’t necessarily matter to rankings anymore.
That said, here are some factors that have remained a baseline for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for many years until now. Some of these key factors are explained in subsequent paragraphs, which one must consider during SEO for better ranking.
1. Backlinks
Backlinks have a strong relationship with organic traffic to the webpages. It is one of the leading search engine optimizations and will continue to rank well in the coming years. Search engines look at your web pages’ network by carrying out an analysis of all other websites that refer to your web pages and make a link to your site.
In this case, when many other domains are referring to your websites, then search engines make a comparison in the more authoritative domain and give more weightage to the more authoritative domain providing a backlink to your domain.
Once you have achieved a backlink from one domain, try to obtain more because multiple backlinks are very helpful in SEO if they are from the same high-authority domain.
Bear in mind, though, that backlinks don’t come for free. If you want quality ones in your web pages, you will have to reach out to a guest posting service UK company like Rankwisely to buy paid guest posts from them. These guest posts are where the quality backlinks you need to rank higher will come from.
It may interest you to know that with a paid guest posting company like Rankwisely, you’ll not only be getting backlinks from random authority sites but from industry-relevant sites.
2. Content Freshness
Consider yourself a person who wants to see the latest news about an update on coronavirus cases. In this case, a site showing the latest data of the past few seconds or minutes may be ranked higher in search than the one website posted similar data on the subject a few weeks back.
The freshness of content is a query dependent factor as some news or information which people are looking for on the internet might be the one which must be latest and updated while on the other hand a person searching for weight loss tips might not consider the fact that when those tips were actually updated on the search engine.
Modern search engines have incorporated this algorithm by which they ascertain the type of content and its freshness status and rank it accordingly for ease of user according to the type of content they are looking for.
3. Page Speed
Page speed is another important ranking factor that Google gives so much importance to. Google doesn’t just want to provide answers to people’s queries; they want to ensure that the answers (website results on the SERPs) they’re providing searchers with are the ones that boast the best UX.
Search engines want to improve users’ experience of the web. To do that, they need to display only fast-loading web pages. So, if your site does not load fast on desktops and mobile phones, it could be difficult for it to rank higher in Google SERPs.
According to Google, the goal is to have sites with a minimum page speed of half a second. If you don’t know what your site speed is, you can check using tools like GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Uptrends.
Although 0.5 seconds is Google’s goal, you’re still going to be up there with the best if you can maintain a speed of below two seconds. But if your site speed is way above this limit, then you may have no choice but to contact a web developer like Hurryworld.com to help you improve your site speed.
4. Depth of Content
Search engines, nowadays, tend to rank sites based on the depth of the content they’re providing. That is, a site will rank higher in the rankings if Google perceives that the site has provided the most suitable and useful content for a query asked by the user.
That doesn’t necessarily point to “longer content,” as some people love to assume. But if what it will take to provide the best answers to a given subject is “long-form content,” then so be it.
By and large, whatever it is you’re trying to discuss in your blog posts, articles, guides, and web pages make sure you don’t leave any detail out.
5. Good On-Page SEO
One other significant factor which is closely related to user experience on search engines is the on-page optimization. This deals with the technical components of a website, which includes page content, page titles, meta descriptions, SEO images, URL optimization, and links (internal and external).
Usually, site owners hire SEO companies, like SEO service Canada, to help perfect their site’s performance. You, too, can hire one today, if you want to improve your site’s UX.
6. Friendly to Mobiles
The mobile phone is a daily used gadget and used by almost every literate person around the globe. The website’s mobile-friendliness is another major search engine ranking factor. Nowadays, more people use mobile phones than desktops to gain access to the internet, and that is one of the reasons for search preferences incorporated by modern search engines.
Google has introduced mobile-first search technology, which means the first results that will be displayed in its search will be mobile-optimized sites, after which it will be optimized for desktop computers. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, then you are probably at a disadvantage.
Read also: What Mobile-First Indexing Means for Your SEO Strategy
Again, this is another area where you can use the help of a web designer like Hurryworld.com. Do not hesitate to reach out to them if you notice that your site isn’t mobile-friendly.
7. HTTPS (Website Security)
Website better security is another most important ranking factor in SEO. People who see a secured connection once they are directed to a website are more comfortable visiting that again than those websites which are not secure. Likewise, search engines have built-in algorithms that ascertain the quality of security website contains, and accordingly, they rank those websites. Websites that enable SSL and easily serve links like HTTPS are likely to be at an advantage over non-secure websites. By comparative advantage, it is meant that a website that is HTTPS-enabled will be ranked higher by the search engine than the one which is not.
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