Google Ranking Factors [Infographic]

Matthew Gates http://notetoservices.com 4m 991 #googlerank

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

When it comes to a Google ranking, there are companies who do it naturally, and other companies who are willing to pay businesses that specialize in driving traffic and rankings. Of course, any company could probably save the extra money, hire an in-house employee, or a freelancer to get the job done. When it comes to ranking, however, the most important fact is: Your website should rank on its own naturally.

There are ways to trick Google into giving you a better ranking, but with hundreds of Google engineers at work and Googlebot discovering tons of those black hat SEO tricks, all websites will eventually get caught and your rankings will suffer.

It takes time, effort, and trust for any website to mature and rank well. No website immediately ranks at the top and no website begins to receive tons of traffic and visitors without advertising, marketing, or developing a fan base. All this takes patience and time.

If you want to do it quick, you could pay a lot of money for advertising and get a company website popular that way. For example, if Snapple is releasing a new flavor, they are already a well known company and a few hundred commercials around the United States will drive traffic to the website. Since it is receiving a lot of direct traffic and indirect traffic from reviews and sites linking it, Google is likely to rank it higher almost instantly instead of over the span of several months.

For those companies or webmasters who do not have the kind of budget Snapple has to work with, you are better off thinking of creative ways to attract visitors and drive traffic to your website. It would probably be cheaper to hire a full-time Social Marketing employee than to run a hundred advertisements nationwide on a television commercial.

A company interested in building a natural ranking with Google should focus on building natural links, using an appropriate amount of keywords that are unique to the company, creating unique and interesting content, designing contests that drive traffic from social media websites to the company website or company product.

The company should have a fast loading website with no errors and should be publishing relevant content or offering unique products or services. While a company should always ensure its main website is easy to navigate and offers incentive for visitors to stay longer, an optimized mobile website will also help with ranking, as Google will see traffic from mobile devices, and attribute an additional ranking factor to the website.

This infographic explores further Google ranking factors in detail.

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Google

Top Search Engine Ranking Factors

Here are top 10 FACTORS that lead to a better ranking, not listed in any order of priority or importance.

Web admins and site owners tend to worry about a site’s Google ranking more than anyone else’s. They have reasons to worry so. Google’s ranking factors depend on a number of steps, of which pagerank is just one of them. A pagerank is the importance that Google gives for a particular page.

THE KEY TO USING KEYWORDS

Much of search engine optimization takes place while writing content or just before publishing it. Keywords are important, even if many have begun to feel they aren’t quite so. TO begin with, a title’s keywords must match the content and search terms. Keywords need to be used in the content as well, but sparingly. Keywords help Google’s spiders to understand what your content is about.

IT IS ALL ABOUT LINKING

There are certain off-page ranking factors which every web-admin must consider. It is well known by now that back links from trustworthy or authority sites are important to boost a site’s SEO rank. One can always include quality inbound links to other sites, as that is favored by Google as well. Linking to informative and well established sites is paramount.

INTERNAL LINKING

One could also link to other websites that you may own, if the content is relevant. Internal linking helps to drive traffic to previous posts even if they are old.

IMPORTANCE OF SOICAL SIGNALS

The Internet has become social, and a site’s importance depends on how much it is shared, liked, or endorsed by those who visit it.

CLEAN URLS

The URL structure must be clean, and should not be clogged with symbols, numbers, and meaningless alphabets. For this, one would have to change the URL slug in the permalink.

USING AND NOT USING SEO TOOLS

While it is not a great idea to use tools that claim to help improve search engine ranking, there are a few good tools that make descriptions and titles appear in a clean way when one shares links on Facebook, or when they appear in search results.

IMPORTANCE OF META DATA

Meta descriptions, meta titles, and meta keyword tags allow readers to identify the kind of content that a link might lead them towards. It also helps search engines like Google to identify what the site is all about and direct users to the webpage based on their queries.

ERROR FREE AND CLEAN WEBPAGES THAT LOAD FAST

Flash and JavaScript are not particularly SEO friendly, and using HTML5 may always be more search optimized than using the former two. At the end of the day, great content that makes visitors keep coming back to your site is what is most important. HTML5 loads faster and is more search engine friendly than Flash.

CONTENT QUALITY

One must write for human readers, and not search engine robots. Rewriting, plagiarizing, or not contributing anything new can affect a webpage negatively.

PUBLISHING FREQUENCY

It is also important to publish regularly. Web crawlers and spiders visit pages more often when content is published in regular intervals.

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Matthew Gates is a freelance web designer and currently runs Confessions of the Professions.

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