Today, knowing about SEO can be of tremendous value.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s all about trying to rank your website as high Google search results.
Today, we want to go over the top ten most important things that you need to consider when thinking about Google ranking factors. If you manage to nail all ten, then the likelihood of your pages being shown on the first page in Google search results is very high.
Speed
When it comes to Google ranking factors, one that many might not consider is the speed of your website.
Whether we’re typing into our search engine, or saying “OK Google” to our Google Home, we want to get a results as fast as possible. Let’s be honest for a second, most of the time, when a page is taking too long to load, we won’t wait for it, we’ll just leave and go onto another website.
Did you know that according to a study done by Google in 2018, 53% of people will leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load when they’re searching via their mobile phone?
If you want to know how fast your website is, you can use tools such as “Google Page insights” which are free to use.
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate refers to the number of people who click on a website but leave after viewing only one page. If your site has a low bounce rate, it will have a higher SEO rate.
Offering people what they expect alongside real value are the first steps in preventing them from leaving right away.
Mobile SEO
Did you know that according to data gathered by StatCounter, about 52% of Google searches are done via mobile phone? Over half of the people using Google are doing so via their mobile phones.
Gone are the days when all of our searches were done while sitting at a computer on a desk. Google Chrome and other popular browsers are also available on mobile phones. To accommodate these users, Google uses “mobile-first indexing” when organizing their SEO ranking.
Even if the desktop version of your website is flawless, you’ll need to make sure you have a mobile-friendly web design. This will offer a pleasant experience to your visitors while they are on their phones.
If you want to know more about how good your website is for mobile phones, a useful E-Marketing tool you can use is “Google’s Mobile Friendly Test“. There is no denying that mobile SEO is a big part of Google SEO.
Internal Links
Another large factor when it comes to Google Website ranking is the efficiency of the internal links on your website.
What are internal links?
“Internal Links” refers to links on your website that take the reader to other pages on your website. But don’t be thinking that just throwing internal links here and there is going to be good enough.
You need to make sure that all your internal links are both organized and tightly knit.
How to use internal links
The best way to do this, is to organize them into topics.
You can, create a pillar article that you can then link to cluster articles.
For example, let’s say you have a blog about self-help.
You might have a pillar article about the top 10 ways to reduce stress. Then 10 cluster articles each one about one of the tips you’ve spoken about in your cluster article.
If people like the look of your website design, there’s a high chance they’ll click on these links as they will want to learn more.
According to Ahrefs, the popular clothing brand “Ninja Outreach” has found that using internal links helped to boost their organic traffic by 40%.
Keywords
One of the most well-known aspects of Google Search ranking is Keywords.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the words and phrases that people tend to type into their search engine. If your website has a lot of these, there will be a higher chance of the Google algorithms viewing your website as one that contains information that will be of greater use to more people.
You can find keywords using a kwfinder such as WordTracker, or Google Keyword Finder (which you will need a Google account but not a Google Ads account to use).
Keyword Stuffing
However, when you’re optimizing, you need to avoid the mistake that every SEO newby makes – keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing is where you shove a load of keywords together, and it reads terribly. The trick is to put your keywords into your pages in a way that flows naturally.
If you’re wondering how important keywords are for Google online marketing, let me tell you a fun fact.
In one survey, conducted by Directive, 78% of marketers said that keyword research is a high-impact practice for driving new traffic.
Titles and headers
If you want to really up your SEO ranking factors game when it comes to keywords, use them in the body of your text, but more important than that are the title and headers in your articles.
Google algorithms find that the keywords are in the titles and headings of your posts and it will look at the whole post as being something that will be of great value to many people.
Use Keywords
Putting keywords into your titles is one of the best digital marketing tips you can know. The best thing you can do is have your strongest SEO search term in (or even as) the title of your article, and repeat it several times throughout the piece.
You don’t need to be an expert web dev to be able to title your articles now, do you?
According to Databox, 36% of SEO experts believe that the headline is THE, not one of the, but THE most crucial SEO element.
Meta-Description
The word “meta” is one that can confuse quite a few people. But when it comes to “meta-descriptions”, it’s actually not something that you need to get too confused about.
What is a meta-description
A website’s “meta-description” is the description that’s put underneath it when it appears on Google search results. The purpose of this description is to explain to people what the article is about and why they should click on your website and not other websites that are above or below yours.
When writing this description, you should make sure it contains everything they will want to know and a either a strong CTA or a nice “hook”.
How to nail the meta-description
If the meta-description doesn’t have enough information, people may not find what they’re looking for and go to one that they can rely on instead. But if it’s too long, many will just get lost in it and scroll away. Keep it clear and on point.
Although it’s not vital, it’s worth thinking about. Did you know that in 2017, Google increased the length of snippets in search results?
Image Text
Images can help an article come to life, and make it stand out. Most people will be drawn to pretty pictures, and we won’t want to spend all our time reading if there are not pictures that we can look at.
Images can help an article come to life, and make it stand out. Most people are drawn to pretty pictures and don’t want to spend all the time looking at black and white.
When you add pictures to your website, the image text can have a massive impact on SEO. When I say “image text”, I’m not talking about the jokes that are written on memes, I’m talking about the name of the image files.
When you add images to your website, make sure their names are telling the reader what they are, preferably with the keywords. There are several reasons why this is a good idea.
Visually Impaired People
Visually impaired people will most likely have a software that tells them the name of an image. They’ll be able to tell more about what the picture is when it’s called brown_dog_eating_bone.JPEG than they would do if it was called httfhow65hk8.JPEG.
Slow computers
If someone’s computer is slow and your website doesn’t load properly, they’ll still know what the picture is of, even if they can’t see it.
SEO
And finally, when you use SEO terms to name your images, the Google ranking system will look at your website more favorably.
Image text is more important when your business is B2C rather than B2B. According to Social Media Examiner, 11% more B2C marketers than B2B marketers say visual content is the most important type of content today.
URL
It’s not just what’s on your website, it’s the website itself that matters.
And part of your website is going to be the URL.
Keep it short
Let me ask you a question, which website would you rather visit
doggyadvice.com/blog/how_to_train_your_puppy or
blogsbay.net/mark_smith7866/blog68765990658 ?
Websites with an optimized URL are more likely to be clicked on as people will be able to tell immediately what the page content is. It will also be seen better by Google as it will assume it’s more professional.
Keywords
It’s going to be better if you can get your target keyword in the URL, this will make Google think that it’s exactly what people will be looking for.
To give you a clue about how long your URL should be, the average length of URLs ranked in the top 10 is 37 characters.
Write Well
I hate to be the kind of blogger who always states the obvious, but I’m going to. Because a lot of the time, the obvious is what matters the most.
Remember your English lessons
Make sure that what you’re writing is of good quality. You don’t spend 16 years of your life doing English lessons just to have all of those skills go down the drain now that you’re an adult. Don’t be ashamed of showing off your writing skills.
The better you can write, the more likely you are to have people visiting your website.
Update your old work
You should never be scared to write articles. Anyone who’s ever looked at Google trends will be able to tell you that terms that were once popular are no longer used. If you have an article that used to generate a lot of traffic but no longer does, an idea could be to rewrite the article using updated keywords.
For example, you may have written about the “Top 10 films of 2019”. In 2020, you could rewrite this article as “best movies from last year to watch during lockdown”.
If people liked it then, there’s a high chance they’ll still like it today.
Backlinks
And finally, we have backlinks.
What are backlinks?
This is a term that very few people outside of SEO know about, but having them can increase the flow to your traffic by a lot.
Backlinks are when your website is linked to from other websites.
For example, if you’ve written about how to clean your kitchen, and another writer is doing a similar piece, they could use your blog for research and link back to your article.
How to get backlinks
There are four key ways you can get more backlinks.
- Write well. If your content is good, people are naturally more likely to backlink it.
- Cold outreach. This is simply where you ask people to backlink your articles on their blogs or websites.
- Guest Posts. Write as a guest on other people’s blogs, and in your posts, link back to your own website.
- Thought leadership. Use things like podcasts or webinars to lead people to your website.
Backlinks can have an amazing impact on your website. Did you know that according to ahrefs, 91% of all pages will never get any organic traffic from Google because they don’t have any backlinks?
Conclusion
If you follow the advice I have just given you, you’ll find that your website gets more traffic. When running a website, knowing about SEO can be the difference between a successful website, and an utter flop. If you’re having any trouble with optimizing your website, drop us a line or ask a question in the comments section.
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