Ranking a website or webpage on the google search engine can seem a little bit difficult, but knowing the factors for Google's SEO rankings would make google ranking easier and help your website or webpage rank high on the search result.
Google has over 200 ranking factors in their google ranking algorithms, but they have kept most of their search engine ranking factors a secret. But today we would be showing the factors that have been proven to help rank websites and webpages. These are google ranking factors that are used by every website owner currently ranking on the search engine.
One way to determine is to observe various results on the google search result page and research on the top webpages to see how they all apply the various factors for google ranking.
If and when all factors for SEO rankings are checked then you are sure of higher google website rankings on the search result page provided there are no technical issues.
So let's drive straight into the most important Google SEO factors
Top Google SEO Ranking Factors
The following are the most important Google SEO ranking factors for your website
TITLE
Titles are the heading words you give to your webpage, these titles are what tells Googles search algorithms what the general overview of the webpage is talking about.
Google understands the usefulness of using a title for a webpage and because of this, it is one of the ranking factors used by Google to help rank a webpage/website on the search results page.
So it's important to make use of titles for your website or webpages and always insert the keyword you are trying to rank for in the title.
HEADINGS
Headings are used to communicating the organization of the content on the page. They are strategies to help readers both determine the overall outline of the document, and navigate to specific information on the webpage.
In general, they are titles and subtitles and are defined with the <h1> to <h6> tags with <h1> defines the most important heading.
Google looks at proper heading on webpages and uses that for search ranking.
So the best practice is to properly use heading for your webpages and use them accordingly, for important topics make use of the H1 tag while for subtopics make use of H2 tags, and then if you have topics that fall under your subtopic then you can make use of H3 and so on till H6 tags. It's not necessary and compulsory to make use of all Heading tags.
When headings are used and properly arranged, Google's algorithm understands the structure of the website, and they use that as an on-page SEO factor. Remember to always insert the keyword you want to rank for in your headings, most especially the H1 tags.
CONTENT LENGTH
Google uses content as one of its major ranking factors and they have also made it clear that creating quality and long-form content is part of their on-page SEO ranking factors.
So to help rank your websites and webpages you would need to create quality and long-form content.
For service and product contents, it is recommended to create above 700 words above and for blog post content it is recommended to create above 1000 words.
CONTENT RELEVANCY
When creating content, you must ensure your content is relevant to your topic. This is because Google now uses content relevance as a ranking factor.
So stick to the topic and when creating long-form content, ensure you write in-depth about the topic.
For example, this blog post is about the "Factors for Google SEO rankings", if we decide to start discussing "How to rank on Google Search Engine" it means we are deviating and the content relevancy drops which automatically affects the ranking because Google would be able to detect its content relevance.
KEYWORDS
Keywords are part of the main ranking factors that Google uses to rank websites high in the search results pages.
What does this mean?
It means Google crawler, crawls your websites and searches for keyword relevancy, which means the more you apply your keyword(s) in your content the better the chances of ranking in the search engine result page.
Keywords you plan on ranking for, when placed strategically in your content would help your rankings. However, avoid keyword stuffing as that's a perfect way of Google penalizing your content and de-ranking your content also, to the extent of removing it from their search result page.
PAGE SPEED
Page Speed! Also one of the top Google ranking factors for ranking. This ranking factor can't be avoided, if you have a slow website or webpage, they won't be able to rank high on the Google search result page.
After Google made the page speed update, most website owners have ever since then improved their load time speed resulting in higher search ranking.
So, make sure your website/webpages load fast as this is a ranking factor.
To check your page speed, you can use Google's Page Speed Testing Tool.
MOBILE-FRIENDLY PAGES
Create Mobile-friendly websites and webpages, as Google has switched to mobile-first indexing. This means websites/webpages would be crawled and indexed first on mobile and more ranking would be based on mobile-friendly websites.
So if your website or webpage isn't mobile-friendly, then you are losing out on ranking high on Google as it's a ranking factor.
INTERNAL LINKING
Internal linking means linking to another webpage on your website (i.e. from your current webpage). An example is at the beginning of this blog post we linked to one of our previous posts using the anchor text "200 ranking factors", which leads you to the blog post we created about the 200 ranking factors of Google.
Google doesn't like stand-alone webpages and uses internal linking as a ranking factor.
So when creating content for your service, product pages or blog posts, it's essential you perform interlink to a relevant page, even if it means just a single internal linking.
EXTERNAL LINKING
Similar to internal linking, external linking involves linking to external sources, meaning if you are discussing a point and you find an outside resource that could be helpful to your reader, you then link to that content from your own content. That's what we call External Linking.
We have linked out to resourceful materials on this particular blog post, which we feel would be helpful to understand some context more. An example is after explaining the Page Speed as a ranking factor we linked to Google's own update news about Page speed and also linked to Google's own Page Speed Tool using the anchor text "Page Speed Testing Tool".
So, ensure to always link outside to resourceful material mostly for blog posts as Google uses this as an on-page ranking factor.
SOCIAL SIGNAL
Social signals involve signals about your website/webpage from social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
These signals are picked by Google and are used as a ranking factor.
Make sure you post often about your website/webpage on the various social media platforms you must have registered on. And this could be done by adding your website/webpage links on some posts.
DOMAIN AGE
Domain age plays a very important role in Google's ranking factors. When ranking for keywords in search results pages, Google takes note of the domain age.
The domain age entails how long the domain has been in operation. And Google favors domains that have been in existence to newer domains. So when trying to rank for certain keywords consider the types of domains you are dealing with.
For example, a company that has been in existence, let's say over 30 years can be trusted over a newly established company of 1 year. That applies to domain age, Google favors older domain over newer domains.
DOMAIN AUTHORITY
You have just learned that domain age is also a ranking factor, another aspect of the domain ranking factor is the domain authority.
Domain authority has to do with how authoritative the domain is, which includes the quality of backlinks pointing to the domain. Google uses these as a ranking factor most time, that is why it is usually difficult to rank for some terms (keywords) because the domains showing high on the Google search results page all have high domain authoritativeness.
So, the domain authority of a webpage is a ranking factor.
URL STRINGS AND LENGHT
URL strings need to be user and SEO friendly, avoid the use of underscores, spaces or any other characters to separate words because adding these unnecessary URL strings can cause issues with duplicate pages and affect your SEO rankings, as Google uses the structure of a URL as a ranking factor.
Which brings us to the point where we need to note that our URLs need to be user friendly, as short as possible, between 35 - 48 characters, should be definitive but concise, use lowercase letters instead of uppercase letters.
Since URLs are part of Google's ranking factors, it's best to ensure all practices are put in place to avoid low ranking(s).
BACKLINKS
Backlinks! This is really an important Google ranking factor.
Backlinks are links from other relevant, authoritative, news websites that point back to your webpage/websites.
It is this backlink(s) that gives your webpage/website authoritativeness, which Google picks up as a signal and increases your ranking(s) in the search engine result page.
These links pass what we call link juice (authoritativeness) to your website domain thereby increasing your domain authority. And you remember previously, that we stated domain authority as a ranking factor. Which results from backlinks.
Backlinks can be considered as Google's key ranking factor.
USERS EXPERIENCE (UX)
Google doesn't directly use User experience as a ranking factor, rather they make use of the bounce rate which automatically relates to the user's experience on the website.
When the bounce rate of a website is high Google notices and they can use that against your website.
What can cause a high bounce rate or poor user experience? It can be caused by poor website design and structure or slow page speed. So it's important to ensure those two factors are in check to improve the user's experience and be in favor of one of Google's ranking factor which is the Users Experience.
CONCLUSION
Google's ranking factors are over 200 as stated in the beginning, but that shouldn't scare you because once you have all the above-ranking factors in check you would have little to no problem with your rankings because these are the top ranking factors of Google.
And they "Google" always states these particular ranking factors in any of their content plus it's been applied by various SEO experts on websites/webpages and they have seen results.
If you have any questions regarding the ranking factors of Google and how they can affect your rankings, kindly drop your questions in the comment section.
Also, do you want an SEO company to take care of your website SEO for higher rankings? Do well to contact us.
Comments