When it comes to SEO, there are tons of variables that affect the ranking of websites. On top of all these different factors, a constant change of algorithm by google will keep competition high in ranking a website.
Although these are the challenges faced by companies, well-optimized sites will garner you more visits which in turn will turn into reliable leads. Without proper SEO, searches won’t be able to find your site and all your hard work will lead to nothing.
A common question asked by many users would be “How do I rank higher on google?” or “How can I improve my SEO and appear relevant to searchers?” As these being said, Google’s SEO ranking stated that their purpose is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Delivering content applicable to searchers and being rank top page would be relevant as statistic shows that 95% of people would never make it past page 1 of google search.
Thus, in this guide, we will go through 3 fundamental SEO ranking factors that you need to dominate to gain visibility to your searches and target audience.
What are the top 6 Fundamental SEO ranking factors?
1. Page optimization
A proper page optimization will improve SEO ranking tremendously. Different business types will have different objectives you will want to optimize for. For example, if it’s an e-commerce website, you’d want to figure out how to increase purchases and average order values by practicing on quantitative and qualitative research on key pages. A business informative website would offer freebies and goodies to attract searchers to enquire. Conducting different A/B testing within the web page itself, searchers need to understand what the company has to offer. These optimizations will include below mentioned technical SEO, On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO tweaking.
Technical SEO
Refers to the process of optimizing your website for crawling and indexing. It is therefore known as technical due to the nature that it is not relevant to any actual content of the website.
To better improve in technical SEO, we would thus look into a specific preferred domain with www or non-www. Is the website properly secured with an SSL certificate? Optimizing your robots.txt file residing in the root directory of your websites to enable better crawling. Optimizing your URL structure by cultivating lowercase characters, use “-” to separate words in the URL, make short descriptive, avoid unnecessary words or keyword stuffing. Add breadcrumbs menu to your site as well. Implement structured data markup and SEO. Check canonical URLs on every page of your website. Optimize your 404 page. Optimize your XML sitemap. Improve your website speed on desktop as well as mobile. Consider adding AMP pages as well. These items mentioned above can be easily executed by Adssential Marketing with full audit and fixes to all your SEO problems.
On-Page SEO
A method used to optimize individual web pages to be ranked in search engines such as Google and Bing. On-page refers to HTML source code as well as content as compared to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. With years of SEO changes, we will look at the latest trends and changes made to better optimized for on-page SEO.
Content:
The information available on the page is what makes a search result position valuable. It is important to create good content which means a strong supply of information and supporting evidence from various sources.
HTML:
The source code generated at the back of the website should be minimum yet producing the maximum results. As codes will affect loading speed, thus it will affect the SEO ranking factor.
Off-Page SEO
A method used to optimize your website with the help of external factors. Improving and optimizing off-page SEO involves improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. This is easily achieved by effectively getting good quality backlinks which are high in domain authority scores, page-level scores and the keyword usage are deemed relevant from the website to your site which you are linking.
2. User Experience (RankBrain)
A machine learning technology called RankBrain used by Google to help deliver its search results more efficiently. This AI technology is used to sort through billions of pages and find the one deemed most relevant for particular queries. RankBrain refines queries by seeking through its database and matches multi-word queries known as “long-tail” queries to better interpret these long queries to match the best pages for the searches. With strong and clear content, information and LSI will help Google better understand the content generated on the page to better deliver optimized results to searchers. This will tremendously improve the search position known as SEO position ranking.
3. Social Signals
Social signals refer to a webpage’s collective shares likes and overall social media activities known to search engines. These activities contribute to SEO ranking. Search engine gauge quality in large part like getting quality linkage from facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Tumblr, and many more social platforms. An increase in social signal indicates a good domain authority and demonstrate a strong web URL value.
Although these are the only 3 fundamental SEO ranking factors named by Adssential Marketing. There are factors and variables affecting the SEO rankings on different websites. That being said, a change in algorithm might also bring an end or a start of new variables we ought to consider to implement. These 3 factors known as page optimization, user experience, and social signals are the fundamentals of SEO since the start of the digital era.