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How your website ranks
When it comes to ranking your website's position on search engines, Google is still both king and Queen. Majesticseo, SEMRUSH, Quantcast and others still matter, but Google is used by 94% of all seekers, so it is important to know what factors google uses to determine the placement of your site on SERP (Search engine results pages). Here are all the big ones, with a few medium ones thrown in.
Additional components of preferable websites:
- Disallow broken links. Check these often.
- Short urls have a slight edge.
- Google media guidelines will tell you that it is wise to have sources and cite them, just like a research paper.
- Have a Contact page.
- Please have a sitemap, and not just because Search Engine Journal says so. A sitemap helps spiders crawl your site.
- Have an SSL certificate.
- Display a "terms of service" page and a "privacy" page.
DOMAINS
- Domain age: A domain name less than one year old has less value than a domain that is older than that. Any time less than one year in and of itself has no significance. Of course, many ways exist to compensate for this.
- Having a keyword in your domain acts as a relevancy signal, ust as having the keyword as the first word in the domain is crucial.
- The farther in the future your domain expires, the more legitimacy is possesses.
- Do not let the domain registration company sell you the Privacy mode, especially if you have several sites. Don't be afraid of your telephone. It is your friend.
- Stick with .com .edu .gov .net and .org and stay away from non-US suffixes unless your site is based overseas.
PAGE LEVEL
- Your keyword should remain in the title tag. To be clear, a title tag is an HTML element that specifies the titleof a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.
- title tags that starts with a keyword tend to perform better than title tags with the keyword towards the end of the tag.
- your description tag can impact click-through-rate, which is a key ranking factor.
- The keyword should appear in your h1 tag. Google uses your H1 tag as a secondary relevancy signal. For those still learning, the <h1> tags are used to identify the most important HTML headings, whereas <h6> is the least important.
- Content with more words can cover a wider breadth and are likely preferable in the algorithm compared to shorter, superficial articles.
- Both Google and Bing use page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on your page’s HTML code.
- Google Hummingbird is a major algorithm change Google officially announced in September 2013. The Hummingbird algorithm substantially altered the way Google search results work in an effort to improve the way users interact with those results and provide more direct answers to specific queries. This is part of Google's process to shift from simply searching individual query words to instead understanding the meaning of a query as a whole, and therefore providing more useful and relevant results. Thanks to Hummingbird, Google can now better understand the topic of a webpage.
- Duplicate content on the same site will have a negative impact on your site's placement, even if that content is slightly modified. At the same time, the use of Rel=Canonical can decrease the negative impact of duplicate content. Still, why bother? Do't assume your user (or your search engine)is an idiot.
- Use Alt tags on every image.
- Update your site with new content at least every week without cumbersome repetition or duplication.
- Remove content that is out of date or irrelevant.
- Linking out to what are called "authority sites" benefits your seo. Authority sites that you link to improve your own trust factor which in turn improves your position. But the links need to make sense. If you sell tires online, linking to a Washington Post article about tax reform will not help and may even penalize you. In a similar vein, too many outbound links will hurt you.
- Learn to spell and use proper grammar.
- Content hidden behind tabs will mess you up.
- Fix or delete all broken links on your site.
- If you have references and sources for your content, site them.
- Use bullets or numbers when creating lists such as this one.
- Your content needs to be useful, relevant, significant and not redundant or stupid.
SITE-LEVEL FACTORS
- Affiliate sites are a waste of time and money because they provide little or no value to users.
- You must include accurate contact information and that information should match your whois.com information.
- Sitemaps are crucial. Most sitemaps look like this:returnoninitiative.com/sitemap.xml These are usually built into weebly sites, but go to the Google Console to double check.
- Get an SSL certificate (secure sockets layer). SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins, and more recently is becoming the norm when securing browsing of social media sites.
- Add a Terms of service as well as a privacy page to your website.
- Employ breadcrumb navigation. This means you want to make it very easy for your user to go to the home page or any other page from wherever he or she is.
- Use YOUTUBE videos but keep them off the home page.
- We live in a gig economy. One consequence of this horrendous situation is that customer reviews matter.
- Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of all visits to your website that result in the user leaving after arriving at the landing page and going nowhere else on your site. In short, the visitor left after looking at only one page. The lower the bounce rate, the more satisfying google interprets your site to be and thus the higher your rating and position.
BACKLINKS
Backlinks remain the most important feature of getting your site a fine position on google. If your site is professional in appearance, internally sound, possesses relevant content and is properly promoted, other people should want to link to your site. There are things that can be done to help with this process.
Backlinks remain the most important feature of getting your site a fine position on google. If your site is professional in appearance, internally sound, possesses relevant content and is properly promoted, other people should want to link to your site. There are things that can be done to help with this process.
- Backlinks from older sites are preferable.
- Backlinks from root domains (the part of the domain at the hierarchical top, before the .com .edu .net or .gov) remain the strongest positioning factor. Even so, one site linking to you from multiple pages is still a big help.
- Although Google denies this, many of us believe that backlinks from .edu and .gov sites carry more weight. We are correct.
- Getting backlinks from worthy competitors is a good thing.
- Do not create a bunch of websites to use as backlinks to your own.
- Hyperlinks within text are the most powerful backlinks one can get, assuming they are from authority sites. Links appearing within normal text outrank those appearing in sidebbars and footnotes or endnotes.
- Older links outrank newer ones.
- Do not use reciprocal links.
- Forum spamming backlinks will get you penalized.
- Word count matters.
USER INTERACTION
- After backlinks, user interaction is the most important facet in determining search position because google wants thee user search to have value. Google developed a sophisticated algorithm called RankBrain that is superior to anything else in determining with precision what the user wants to find. Therefore, some precision in the text and imagery of your site is no more important than ever.
- Organic click through rates increase a website's google position.
- Keep your bounce rate low. The bounce rate is the percentage of overall visits to your site where the user exits after visiting only one page.
- While organic searches are wonderful, what is even better is having the user go directly to your website without being directed to do so.
- Having your website bookmarked in chrome is an asset.
- User comments are beneficial.