Google Ranking Factor  

  

  Do you run a business? Want people to find you quickly? Online visibility is the only way to gain more loyal customers. Most of the customers go to online search engines like Google to know more about your business and your work. And there are many factors one should consider to gain customers online.

  

  There are a lot of factors Google follows to rank your website. In Fact, some experts claim that there are more than 200 factors that Google checks for your website ranking. But what they don’t tell you is that there are only ten key and important factors to rank your website at the top of the search results.

  

What is meant by “ranking factors”? 

  There are two types of search results you get from Google. One is paid search ads and the other one is organic search results. Although paid search ads are a great way to gain immediate customer attention, it’s the organic search results the customer chooses for trustworthiness.  

 

  SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process by which you optimize your website to top the Google ranking. All the ad search results and organic search results are determined by the Google algorithm. No one knows for sure, who the Google ranking factors work but with some experiments and expert advice we come to know that there are ten crucial ranking factors important for your website to reach the top of the golden triangle.  

 

Top 10 important Google ranking factors: 

1. Page speed 
2. A Secure and Accessible Website 
3. Backlinks 
4. Mobile-friendliness 
5. HTTPS 
6. Internal links 
7. Content accuracy 
8. Meta description 
9. Technical SEO 
10. User experience 

 

1. Page speed: 

  Page speed is a crucial factor when it comes to Google ranking factors. Most experts agree with the fact that customers visit the page which has a fast loading speed. In Fact the main goal of any website is to give your customers a hassle-free browsing experience. If your page takes too long to load its content, then your page gets bounced back to the low of the search results.  

 

  Google likes to rank the websites which offer visitors a positive browsing experience. So keep this in mind while optimizing your website next time. But how to increase the page speed? By creating a responsive design, well-organized content, and with no intrusive ads you can boost your page speed.  

  There are a lot of tools to check your website speed. The most commonly used tools I recommend you to use are 

1. Google PageSpeed Insights 
2. GTmetrix  

 

2. A secured and accessible website: 

  Google needs an accessible website so that it can see the website’s information and content and rank them accordingly. And with the right kind of URL, you can make the website easily accessible to Google’s bots. Making your website easily identifiable and understandable to Google is a crucial factor to rank your website. 

 

  To make your website accessible to Google, you have to do the following steps, 

• The website should be created with a well-coded website builder. 
• You should also have a robot.txt file for the bots to access the website and instruct them where they can look for the information and where they cannot. 
• You should develop a sitemap that gives Google a list of contents on your page.  

  Yoast SEO is primarily used by WordPress developers to develop the sitemap. So making a secured and accessible site also plays a major role in the site’s ranking factor.  

 

3. Backlinks 

 

  Backlinks are also called inbound links. Google investigates the number of backlinks your site must rank your website. The backlinks determine how authoritative and relevant your website’s content is. A backlink is a relevant link given by a trustworthy site in their content. Having several Backlinks by authoritative sites helps Google to understand your page better and know your site’s relevance. 

 

     You should also have a few inbound links from low-profile domains to boost your page’s ranking. Backlinks are also important for Google’s PageRank. Many people think that PageRank has lost its importance in recent times, but Google’s Gary Illyes has tweeted that Google still uses PageRank to rank its websites. Relevance and Authority are the key factors in backlinks and how Google uses them to rank your page.  

 

4. Mobile-friendliness 

 

    Mobile-friendliness is a major factor that is booming nowadays in the field of Google rank factors.  Most of the online web users are mobile users. The indulgence of smartphones has made the developers make more mobile-friendly sites. Google gives much preference to the sites which are mobile-friendly first, rather than desktop optimized sites.  

     The key factors for a mobile-friendly site are: 

1. A responsive site that fits the mobile’s view without any data loss.  

1. The fonts and alignments should be easy for the user’s readability.  

1. Your site should contain enough menu options to easily navigate. 

1. No interruptive ad should display on your site’s content.  

     Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is the future of mobile SEO. You should look into the features and rules set by Google AMP in order to make your site more responsive for mobile users.  

 

5. HTTPS 

 

     HTTPS helps you to secure data from the browser and the server. Google still uses HTTPS to rank their sites but it’s not a crucial factor. Google uses HTTPS as a lightweight ranking factor. Having an HTTPS site is very useful for the site and its visitors. If your site is not HTTPS you will get a “not secure” tag in the google search tab. 

 

     Not secure pages receive mails from Google Search Console and ask you to improve your site to HTTPS. HTTPS is an easy win for website owners to rank their site. Let’s Encrypt gives free TLS certificates which helps Google algorithm to rank your site. 

6. Internal links 

     Internal links are hyperlinks given within the site’s content. The internal links tie up the site and make Google and the visitors easily navigate through this site. If your main page links to another blog on your same page, the visitors will easily navigate to that other page thus passing some authority to the next page as well. You should develop the site in such a way that each page in the site helps one another through internal links. 

     The internal links should be tightly knit and organized for the Google bots and the visitors to find what they are looking for. Don’t give internal links to rundown words for the sake of giving them. Each internal link should describe where the link lands within the site. Do a technical SEO audit every two months to look for broken links, 404 Errors, and redirect loops. 

     There are three pillars of SEO audit:

1. On-page SEO
2. Off-page SEO 
3. Technical SEO. 

     On-page SEO deals with content quality, accuracy, keyword optimization, title tags, and image optimization. 

     Off-page SEO is generally backlinks or inbound links and it has a lot to do with brand equity and public relation. 

     Technical SEO deals with indexation, site’s crawl ability, site speed, site architecture, and overall accessibility of the site. 

7. Content accuracy 

     Google ranks sites that provide accurate results for their search terms. Imagine you are searching for “who founded Apple” and the search results show ”Bill Gates and Paul Allen”, you would lose trust in Google. That’s why Google ranks pages with accurate content with authoritative backlinks. YMYL (Your Money Your Life) queries are web searches that may have a potential negative impact on the user’s finance and lives. 

     YMYL queries are mostly health-related queries. For example, if you search how many doses of aspirin is needed for headache and google shows some inaccurate dosages amount as search results, it is dangerous and life-threatening. So backlinks are important for google to know the site’s content accuracy. Also, Google uses its knowledge graph about people, places, and things to enhance search results. 

8. Meta description

     A URL’s meta description is the concise line of text that shows up underneath each blue connection on Google’s SERPs, summing up the substance inside. A meta description should be easy for Google and visitors to understand about the content inside our site. Most CMSs have a committed field where you can populate your meta description. A good meta description will entice the visitors to click your site. 

     A meta description is a lightweight ranking factor and having a relevant meta description for the content is a major plus for your site. People go through the meta description before entering your site for the content you provide. So you should optimize the meta description to match your content. WordPress developers mostly use Yoast SEO to create meta descriptions for their webpages. The meta description determines the click-through rate which directly affects your page’s ranking. 

9. Technical SEO 

     Like we said earlier, technical SEO deals with indexation, site’s crawl ability, site speed, site architecture, and overall accessibility of the site. URL architecture, site architecture, Robot.txt files, and image delivery deals with the technical SEO of your site. A technical SEO determines whether your site is crawlable and the pages and posts in your sites are indexable. Your page should have header tags like h1, h2, and h3 according to the content you create. 

     The meta description should be catchy and entice the audience within 160 characters. The images also should have the keyword phrases for Google to understand the image relevancy to the content. Technical SEO also deals with the site’s accessibility and user-friendliness. Making the site more accessible for both desktop and mobile users is a key factor in ranking your site. Also, check the page speed while doing an SEO audit and make sure your page has less response time. 

10. User experience 

     For some time presently, Google’s been utilizing bots to more readily rank pages. It calls that signal RankBrain. This incorporates different signs that influence your internet searcher’s positioning. These include: 

1. Active clicking factor: the level of individuals who snap to visit your site after a passage comes up in indexed lists 

 

1. Skip rate (particularly pogo-staying): the number of individuals who click on your page and rapidly return to the indexed lists 

 

1. Abide time: how long guests remain on your site after they’ve shown up rank cerebrum is-one-of-the-SEO-positioning variables web crawler land.

     User experience is a major factor in the ranking factor decided by Google. If your page has the best user experience with all the other factors mentioned above, Google will rank your page in the top order. 

Conclusion:

     While Google’s ranking factors and algorithm changes day by day, it is the duty of the site’s proprietor to keep tabs on the changing aspects and march forwards the website’s success. Factors like HTTPS, backlinks are lightweight factors for a site’s ranking and page speed, user’s experience and content accuracy are gaining momentum in the ranking factor of Google.