- A Secure and Accessible Website
Unsurprisingly, the first of our SEO ranking factors has to do with having the right kind of URL. Specifically, that’s a URL that Google’s bots can easily reach and crawl.
- Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
Page speed has been cited as one of the leading SEO ranking factors for years. Google wants to improve users’ experience of the web, and fast-loading web pages will do that.
- Mobile Friendliness
While we’re on the subject of mobile, mobile-friendliness is another major SEO ranking factor. More people use mobile devices than desktops to access the web, and that’s one reason there’ve been changes in how Google ranks search results.
- Domain Age, URL, and Authority
Did you know that nearly 60% of the sites that have a top ten Google search ranking are three years old or more? Data from an Ahrefs study of two million pages suggests that very few sites less than a year old achieve that ranking.
So if you’ve had your site for a while and have optimized it using the tips in this article, that’s already an advantage.
- Optimized Content
We’ve talked a lot about content in this guide to Google SEO ranking factors. That’s because it’s one of the most important search ranking factors (right up there with user experience, links, and RankBrain, which we’ll get to in a while).
Now let’s dig down and see what optimizing content for SEO really means.
- Technical SEO
We said earlier that getting the code right is one aspect of optimizing content for better search engine rankings. This can be intimidating, especially if you’re more of a wordsmith and less of a “techie.”
Here are some of the aspects you can control even if you’re not a coder:
- Add keyword phrases in page titles, which is where Google first looks to determine which content is relevant to which search
- Use header tags to show content hierarchy starting with your title at h1 and then use h2 or h3 for subheads
- Create a meta description that both entices readers and includes your keyword phrase
- Keep those meta descriptions short and catchy at around 160 characters
- Use keyword phrases in image alt tags to show how those images are relevant to the main content
- Include alt tags also help people who are visually impaired enjoy your site with screenreaders
- Use schema markupto tell Google what kind of content you’re producing
- User Experience
For a while now, Google’s been using artificial intelligence to better rank web pages. It calls that signal RankBrain. This includes other signals that affect your search engine ranking. These include:
- Click-through rate: the percentage of people who click to visit your site after an entry comes up in search results
- Bounce rate (especially pogo-sticking): the number of people who click on your page and quickly go back to the search results
- Dwell time: how long visitors stay on your site after they’ve arrived
- Links
As we said at the start, the web is built on links. So, naturally, links are a crucial SEO ranking signal. There are three kinds of links to think about:
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- Internal links
All three are typically tied to a descriptive anchor text.
Inbound Links
Google uses inbound links as one way to help determine how authoritative and relevant your content is.
The best-case scenario is where an authoritative site includes a relevant link to yours in a piece of their content. So, if the Content Marketing Institute includes a link to your content marketing resource, that’ll be perceived better than if a random person with a low-quality site links to it.
You’ve likely heard inbound links referred to as “backlinks.” Your goal is to get as many highly authoritative sites to link back to you. That also means you want to have very few inbound links from low-quality domains.
You can find your inbound links using a tool like SEMrush or one of the keyword research tools shared earlier in this guide.
Outbound Links
At the same time, you want to show that you’re creating quality content for your visitors. That involves using outbound links by linking to relevant, authoritative sites in your niche.
So does that mean you should just give out tons of outbound links to boost your authority? Absolutely not.
All it means is that as you’re doing research, you should only pull from reliable sources with high domain authority. To be honest, for your users’ sake, you should probably be doing this anyway to ensure you provide the most value.
Internal Links
Finally, linking to your own content can help tie pages together for both Google and your visitors, making each page more valuable. If you have an authoritative page and link to another page on your site, that helps your visitors find the other page and also passes on some authority.
- Social Signals
When people share your content on social networks, that’s another sign that it’s valuable. Cognitive SEO’s study of 23 million shares found a definitive link between social shares and search engine ranking.
- Real Business Information
This last tip is important for businesses targeting particular local areas. The presence or absence of business information is one of the most crucial local SEO ranking factors.
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