Search engine and ranking are the two words that are nearly close. Search engines are the gateway to the volt of information you need. Here you can get all sorts of things without any trouble, just search the term you want to know about and it will show everything it has on its database.
This is a search engine where there is nothing you won’t find. In every minute and second, there is new content, blog posts, videos, and others uploading on the internet.
The statistic shows that it’s around 40 trillion gigabytes of data stored in 2020. Data is now something that is more important than properties.
We need required data to analyze, experiment, and implement things properly to demonstrate something bigger and more functional than the present.
Whether we use the search engine only for little inquiry or broad experiment issues, it always satisfies us with results about the query we have asked.
In this article, we will be going to have a deep dive into the search engine and its ranking factors. We will disclose some other cringe topics about the search engines. Though there are a lot of other factors which may come when we start to talk about the search engine.
We will try to cover all of them in this article,
Contents
What are ranking factors?
Basically, we use the word ranking or rank to understand a list of perspectives which is characterized based on so many factors.
Whenever it comes to ranking factors in search engine talking, that refers to the process that search engines use to show the differentiation between organic contents.
As using search engines like google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other becomes a part of our daily lives and we use them to do every single thing online. Fortunately, it doesn’t cost anything to search on the internet, yeah I’m joking! But can you imagine what it would be like that?
We type a keyword, search term, or query in search engines and it provides us a wide amount of information about that. It is just some milliseconds that the search engine takes to show the result.
And it does not end up just by showing results. As search engines are used to store plenty of data and information about the term, it gives a rank of those search results collected from different web pages.
The rank is given based on the content quality and some other factors known as ranking factors. Since Google is the most frequently used search engine at present, it ruthlessly grabs more than 90% of the search engine share market to its own.
So most of the discussion here will go through the google search engine and its ranking factor. Whatever ranking factors make the google search engine marketplace more competitive than it was before.
There was a time when anyone could get the first page rank of google by using some known tricks but the system is already dead. And google brings some more feasible search engine algorithms and systems to carry on this overflowing world of modern technology.
How search results ranking is regulated?
There are so many tales established about the ranking factor of Google. Some of them are proven and some are argumentative. However, ranking factors aren’t prime, they change over time and consequences.
Search engine developers have to update their algorithm and ranking factors to deal with the fraud and spam users who are attempting to rank inconsistently.
So it is a system that provides rank to web pages’ contents to help users find the best information about their query constantly. And it does not come as fully clear to the owners of the webpages.
This is why a search engine like google becomes a matter of experiment, evaluation, and experience. The study of search engines and observing their behaviors is simply known as ‘Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
The word optimization refers to the process which is done to make things effective or to ensure the best usage of any resource. When it is search engine optimization, it means managing websites in the way preferred by the system of search engines.
A person who is good at SEO known as a search engine optimization specialist. The experts have gained so much popularity and SEO experts are now so demandable for the precise service they offer.
SEO experts are adept with website ranking and they do this with their knowledge and experience that they gather for crafting a long time in this sector.
However, search results ranking is regulated according to some important matters, here are some of them that have massed to let you know in this regard.
There are two types of factors that can affect your search engine rankings, they are,
- On page factor
- Off-page factor
Those factors usually come as practices that should be checked well by every webpage owner. However, since the search engine had been discovered, enthusiast people tried to get those hidden factors by practice in different forms with their webpage.
Those practices differ based on their characteristics and field of application. If you are really interested to know about those different ranking factors that are slightly preferred by the search engine google, then you are in the right place. Below we are discussing same,
What are On-page factors in search engines?
So, we have known that there are some factors that regulate webpages’ success, ranking on the search engine result pages, and overall how often users will get to see your webpage when they have searched something related to your covering sectors.
So, on-page ranking factors are referred to as those search engine practices which are directly dealt with in the webpages to optimize their performance. Practicing On-page factors will effectively help to rank your webpage and get higher traffic through organic search results.
In other words, on-page SEO practices are those that make web pages look professional, user friendly, and perfect in all internal aspects. Those aspects are counted by the search engine to give rank to the web pages.
Doing on-page SEO practices better means you are making web pages fit to get the higher rank on SERPs and crafting a way to increase the visibility of it.
Since Google launched in 1998, it has come with lots of updates to keep its algorithm and other behind the scene technology relevant and consistent to provide the best experience to the users.
Google made so many changes over time in this regard that online practitioners have also changed their strategy to match the rhythm of search engines.
But it is good to all that, on page ranking factors have got a few changes and still, it is being prioritized more than off page or other factors of search engines.
What are the important on page ranking factors?
So far, we got two types of ranking factors that work behind the scene to rank web pages. One of them is on page ranking factors about which we have got details above.
Now, you need to understand those factors that impact page ranking and also make your mind how to upward through them.
For your on page SEO tactics, you have to be attentive to the contents of your website, the headline of the content, making sure to use all the HTML tags like title tag, Meta tag, header, etc in their destined place.
However, we are discussing all the important factors that you should practice in your on page SEO. They are,
Content
Contents are one of the main structural elements of a website. A web page is created to publish content about different topics or niches. Content is mainly because of everything on a website based on the content.
Even trading e-commerce websites also requires good quality content to inform both the search engines and peoples that they are available with certain products.
The ranking that search engine gives to the webpages has relied on the content page. If the content of the page is good, user friendly, and follows all the SEO rules in it, then the system must give it a better position on the search engine result page.
Publishing good quality content is the key to see your webpage on the result page of the targeted keyword. Therefore, it is extremely important to make content through SEO instructions. Also, there are tons of articles on the internet, videos on YouTube related to the same. You can give them a check if you are struggling to get quality content and finding ways to overcome it.
Here are some features that must be kept in a container to make it good,
- Reader-friendly
- The headline, the perfect headline gives a good score to your content
- The perfect combination of heading
- Ensures to have the main keyword within the first 100 words of the content
- Good content comes with rich information about what it discusses
- Good content is linkable
- Lastly, good content is unique and don’t include plagiarizes in it
Tags
In web development and content marketing, tags are something that you can’t ignore at any point. If you do so, you will never achieve what you want through your content marketing strategy.
Therefore, you have to take it seriously and in order to make your content marketing journey successful. Tags are considered one of the essential practices in SEO strategy.
There are different tags that take part in different selective positions. To make your content easy to find for the search engine robot, you should use all the tags in their definite position. Here are included all the important tags that you should consider to your on page SEO practice,
The title tag is some kind of HTML tag that defines the title of web pages for the search engine. The search engine is a robot that works automatically.
The robot can’t understand human language, the title of the content, for instance, the search engine isn’t able to understand what the title of your webpage is.
Therefore, we have to use title tags as it helps robots to capture what is the title of the page exactly. Words that are used among the title tags, generally come as a clickable headline of web pages displayed in search engine result pages.
You should use title tag just like this,
<head><title>Example Title</title></head>
Whatever there are some other instructions to follow to keep your title as perfect as possible? You should also count title format and title length to make your title visible for both visitors and robots.
For length, your title should be managed within 50 to 60 characters. It is because Google only shows the first 60 characters of the title if it comes too big. Put your primary and secondary keywords on the title if you can.
Meta Description Tag
Whenever we search for anything in google, we get to a search engine result page that appears with several web pages. We also see titles, URLs, and a snippet of the content bottom of the title and URL through which we ensure that we got the exact thing we want.
That’s called Meta description. Actually, it is not a factor of ranking on search engine result pages but it will make your content get more clicks as well as organic traffic into your website.
However, Meta description tells the search engines about the topic that is discussed in the content. It is important to have a perfect Meta description of each content as it helps robots to provide your web page for a similar search query when anyone has searched.
So, you can take it as a gateway to making your content distinguished from others on the search engine result page. But before seeing it a lot, you should have known the best practices of Meta description to get the highest benefits through it.
For perfect Meta description writing, keep following this instruction below,
- Gauge your Meta description between 150 to 160 characters. It is the number that googles counts while showing Meta description in the result pages
- Always give unique meta description to each content
- Though using keywords on the Meta description is not a ranking fact but you can do this to represent the webpage distinctly and also to get a few more organic traffics who are willing to click on keywords
- You shouldn’t include so many particular keywords on the Meta description as it devalues the whole meta description
- You can use CTA words, alluring phrases to get an impression and make visitors click through to the webpage
Although you can research competition for the keyword that you are working from the competitor’s sites and can decide how your Meta description should look on the search engine result page.
Canonical tag
It is known to all of us, duplicate content is a big issue for those who are running with website strategy and think all day long about it. It is because duplicate content creates a lot of problems for both search engines and the webpage and having too much duplicate may cause lower rank in search engine result pages.
So, what is the deal between duplicate content and canonical tag? Since search engine can’t recognize human languages, it works with HTML tags to define or read. A canonical tag (rel=” canonical”) is similar to them as it is used to specify a distinct URL that contains a similar or master copy of another webpage.
As duplicating is prohibited and the search engines can easily find which part of the content has been taken from another, the use of the canonical tag is the prevention of such duplicating problems.
In other words, you can use the canonical tag to let the search engines know about the updated version of the article that you want to show on search engine result pages except for others.
Therefore, you should use a canonical tag when you have a similarity of topics you have discussed under two or more URLs. By using the canonical tags, you are identifying the most preferred one of them.
However, the canonical tag is much important for SEO because it saves you from being sensed as duplicate content by google. If you don’t use a canonical tag, it will cost you by losing robots’ attention from indexing your content as it already defines you something like a waste of its time.
Heading Tags
Another important aspect of on page SEO factors that is most important for content marketers. If you are familiar with Microsoft Word, then you have seen several heading options at the top of the window.
Contents should be managed well, clearly, and more than that reader-friendly. To ensure these specs in content, creators need to design it in a way that could seem easier and interesting to readers.
When managing content in that way, articles should be designed with headlines gradually. But sometimes they have to use so many heading in a single content to show important topics related to the main topic and so.
In this regard, those certain heading options of MS word like ‘heading1’ ‘heading2’ ‘heading3’…… ‘heading6’ keeps the whole article distinguished from puzzling.
However, the content may come with a lot of different heading which is not a fact but the fact is, those headings should be indicated with HTML heading tags before publishing the content on your website.
Instead of being so serious for H2, H3, H4, or other headings, you should care for your heading1 as it is more important than others.
Although, proper use of all the types of heading in your content will emphasize its performance to rank on SERP and it also gives a good architectural shape to your content.
URL
Many people may not know but the URL structure of the webpage is underrated on page SEO strategy you should care for. URL is the identity of every webpage that conducts a website thoroughly.
A website builds with thousands of page links internally. They create a URL structure all along to make a suitable way for search engine crawlers so that they can easily define their way while crawling through the website.
Your URL structure should come as SEO friendly otherwise crawlers will miss important updates and contents in your website while crawling through that. Though URL strategies often aren’t taken care of by certain website owners due to the lack of knowledge.
But there are some best practices founded by the SEO experts that can keep you a step ahead in the race of search engine result pages. Here are some best SEO practices for URL connection,
- Don’t forget to use the keyword on the web pages URL because search engine also looks to URL’s to recognize what the content related with
- If you want to create a sense for different words in your keyword, then use hyphens between two words on the URL
- Long form URLs are nothing but junk to google and they also confuse search engines. Therefore, you should keep the URL short and relevant so that it could be captured easily by the search engine
- Don’t change your older posts URL as it causes a broken link and users wouldn’t found you if it happened
- Make it clickable so that you can get some organic traffic through the websites URL
- Try not to use numbers in the URL
Image optimization
Images that you are using on your webpages are not only the biggest factor for SEO or ranking on SERP but it is an indicator of good performance on your website. If you already know about this, that’s ok, but if you don’t know this, the next thing that comes to your mind is ‘How’?
Well, adding images to a content marketing strategy is so good because images can easily capture the attention of visitors and also can make long thousands of word articles appealing to read. Isn’t that?
But images can also cause bad performance for your website. Webpages with non-optimized images take a little time for loading. When users find a webpage slow and bad image loading time, chances are higher to leave the website instantly to them.
So, you have to optimize images before including them on your webpage. However, optimized images can help you in some ways like,
- Optimized images will catch easily by the search engine when someone makes an image search
- Optimized images don’t harm the website’s speed or loading time, rather they would make them visually appealing to readers. So image optimization can increase the user experience of your website
If you don’t have the knowledge about image optimization then ask google. It will take you exactly where you can know about this.
Content health
Content health means the length of the content, at present, users are more likely to get all the information of a search query in a particular content. They don’t want to waste their valuable time by finding different parts of an inquiry from different web pages.
This is why content health is a matter of fact and it also counts by the search engines. Search engines look for the length of the contents and gather information on how much it has covered the topic. It can rectify information precisely and can understand how better the content is.
For Google’s sense, the bigger the content is, the more topics have been covered in that. So, try to finish your topic within a single content.
User interface
The user interface will help you to win half of the battle in your on page SEO strategy. The user interface is an important factor in this regard because a better user interface design ensures that users are spending more time on the websites.
Bad user interface caused distortion and for this, users take the easy decision to leave the website. The user interface is undoubtedly a strategic issue for both web designers and website owners. A better user interface comes with a user friendly design in every aspect of a website including, navigation, slider, typography, header, footer, and overall things of a website.
Therefore, you should build a better interface design for the website and also for the users.
Internal linking
Internal linking is another on page factor for SEO strategy. Good internal linking provides a clear structure of your website through that, the web crawler can easily roam everywhere on it.
As both users and search engines use links to find, navigate and travel through your website, your internal linking should be managed properly. Internal linking helps users to find the right pieces of information at the right time.
If the internal linking strategy is going right, then it can boost up your SEO performance for sure. In short, it is one of the best practices to see your website on top of the rank.
For better internal linking, you can follow these tricks
- Create links to keyword-rich anchor text
- You shouldn’t use the same anchor text on the different pages
- Use google search console to audit your internal links
- Create a link with your homepage
However, in the early years of the search engines, people used to think that how many pages they have targeted for a single keyword, the better rank they will conserve for that keyword. In today’s search engine market, it is totally a dumb idea.
Targeting a specific keyword to get rank is commonly known as ‘keyword cannibalization’ at present which has some disadvantages and bad effects on your SEO.
It is because, when you are targeting keywords and mentioning that to multiple pages of your own, it simply means that you are competing with your own. Therefore, it is highly important for you to check your website for keyword cannibalization.
What are the important off page SEO ranking factors?
On page, SEO ranking factors are most important and seem like the main practices that you should do in your website journey. On the page, factors mostly take part to your website inside and deal with direct configuration to show that your website is perfect to be positioned in a higher rank.
On the contrary, off page ranking factors practices are completely different from on page ranking factors. While on page practices depend on the website inside management, off page factors are some practices that are connected to some outside management activities of websites.
In short, off page practices should be done to make google sense that people are taking your website positively which means it will tell google what visitors think about your website and you are doing things properly.
Therefore, off page SEO factors have a high impact on the overall ranking of your websites. People although give high attention to their on page SEO tactics and give less importance to off page strategies. But they don’t know well off page practices can keep them stand out from the crowd when others only pay attention to their on page tactics.
Whatever there are some off-page practices that are recommended by experts to practice on your own? Here are the most important off-page SEO ranking factors that you consider,
Inbound linking
Inbound linking is a highly considerable matter for off page SEO. Many of you may be familiar with backlinks if you are connected with website management or blogging. Actually, Backlink and inbound links aren’t different here. Both of them mean the same thing, commonly used in a profitable way through which a third party website gets a link from you.
As we knew about internal linking in the on page SEO factors, we have got that there was a time when search engines look for mentions of keywords. The higher the mention is, the better the rank will be. But SEO practice gets too hard these days and there are no chances to get rank on SERP by following the way.
Inbound linking is much more important because it gives signals to search engines that the web page contains links of other pages which are already in the ranking. Therefore, you should always count links from healthy websites which have a good position in the ranking.
The value of your inbound links is defined as link authority in the language of SEO. When you are linking other webpages in your content, the exact word that you are using to link is called Anchor Text.
Anchor text is used to give a quick look to the search engines about the inbound link you have got. For inbound linking, the best SEO case scenario would be getting an inbound link from an authoritative site containing the keyword of the page.
Social engage
There are conflicts in this issue where some people believe social media engaging ratio has a high impact on SEO ranking factors while the others say it is not. So, you may think that what google says about this issue?
Well, Google has already ruled that social engagement is not a direct ranking factor anymore. It is because things are too easy to get on social media. Likes, comments, and shares are so cheap that people could get that automatically.
One can easily create a social media page any time and can get thousands of likes through the page within a moment. This is why Google has stopped counting the social media engagements of websites.
But real social shares work and have an influence on website ranking because when you have standard content and you are getting some real attention on that. In such cases, visitors will complete their action by reading the full article or watching the full period and also clicking inbound links to know more.
However, Social signals don’t act as your website’s ranking but they can surely increase the traffic to your website. Therefore, you should consider this and need to make your individual social media presence include more and to increase your brand awareness.
Domain authority is actually a measurement through which search engines can determine how trustworthy a website is. The domain authority of a website explains its significance for such a particular subject or industry.
The domain authority can be characterized in four aspects, they are,
- The prestige of a website and its authors
- Quality of the information presented
- Information and website centrality
- The competitive situation around a subject
There are some issues though which your domain authority score can be affected such as,
- The duration of the time period of the domain name you have. It is said that the longer you had have it, the more benefits you can get through it
- Your domain history is also a notable issue that is counted by the search engine. If the previous domain didn’t comply with best practices, search engines can easily read the previous history of domain names
- Lastly, the number of referring domains is also a considerable matter in this regard to domain authority
Dofollow and Nofollow
Both do follow and no follow are such kinds of links that use search engines to roam over sites on the internet. We have already known about internal linking or inbound linking, that’s why it is not so important to waste time discussing what do follow and nofollow is. But it is more important to know how they keep the impact on your off page SEO ranking factors.
Simply, dofollow are those links that you have got from another website and nofollow links are such links that you have encoded with the nofollow tag (rel= “nofollow”). So we can say that links that aren’t marked with nofollow attributes are simply called dofollow links.
Whenever you have created a link in any of your blog posts, it automatically acts as a dofollow. Generally, dofollow links are considered demandable for your SEO rankings because it is direct and the link will show search engine the value of the website.
But, on the other hand, nofollow links aren’t shown much importance in the ranking factors because they don’t directly affect. This feature of nofollow links prevents black hat SEO practitioners from profiting off of links by planting high quality authoritative websites in the comment section.
Although, still nofollow links call some advantages through it as you can contribute several values with them. Besides, google clearly mentioned one of its previous updates (Search Algorithm Update Penguin) it will take it as a suspicious act that a website contains all dofollow links and there is no nofollow. Therefore,
- Nofollow links are important to create a natural linking profile of your website
- To bring traffic to your website, you should count nofollow links also. By using high authoritative news websites and social media channels, you can expose your brand identity
- Nofollow links can help grow your dofollow links
Here are the following types of content which are usually considered as nofollow links,
- All types of social media links
- Press release
- Forums
- Link on the blog comment
Brand mentions
Brand mentions is another off page SEO factor for ranking. Meanwhile, it is an underrated part of this strategy and doesn’t get much importance from practitioners. You may see the popular brands get mentioned in blog posts, social media, or anywhere online.
In your off page SEO strategy, you should count those brand mentions though they don’t impact on webpage ranking it also has. It is because brand mentions can be either linked or unlinked. Brand mentions which are linked play a role to show value to SEO.
But what about the unlinked brand mentions? From one of the patents of Google, it is indirectly talked about the unreferenced brand mentions which is “An express link, e.g., a hyperlink, is a link that is included in a source resource that a user can follow to navigate to a target resource. An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource”.
Guest posting
Guest posting is not a term using recently in the search engine market, there it is an old practice and a highlighted one. So, if you are a newcomer and pathfinder, then you could make a guest posting in your strategy? But before that, you have to know what the guest is posting.
As its name, Guest posting refers to guest content that will be published in another blog/website for a particular reason. It looks simple but deep inside, guest posts can increase your websites, traffic, improve your link building strategy, and other website ranking factors. How?
First of all, you have to create quality content to get a place in any higher sites which is high in Google rank. For publishing the content, you can get a link and that is exactly on that website. We have already known that brand mentions are one of the underrated off page SEO ranking factors.
But by guest posting, you can mention your brand name from an authoritative site. We have already talked about the content which is good in quality and instructions on how you can create one by yourself.
So, do not waste your time, create quality content and find a place on any authoritative websites.
It is because Google also counts links, it gives a look to all of the links a website contains. This is why guest posting considers the best strategy on the way to SERP.
Read More:
DIFFERENT TYPES OF SEARCH QUERIES AND KEYWORDS
DIFFERENT TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINES
Google my business
Google my business is a registry of local businesses directory operated by google. Businesses all over the world used to enlist their name on this registry to make their check in online. People can easily manage their businesses’ online activity through google my business. So, if you have an online business, and if you don’t include your name on your online local business directory, then you are far behind your competitors. And it is found that google my business is acting as a positive signal to Google. Therefore, it is a vital part for your business website.