Google’s Top 10 Ranking Factors

Google’s top 10 website ranking factors. (Content, KW, Links, Speed, Search Intent…)

High Quality Content

  1. Original, Unique, and Valuable Content
    • Fresh and up-to-date Content
    • Content Length (in 2021 blogs best be 1,890 words)
    • Content Structure (Use H1, H2, H3 tags)
    • Content Organization (use HTML tags for bullets (ol) and number lists (li) to further organize your content)

Keyword Optimization

  1. Title Tags
    • Meta Descriptions
    • Image Alt Text
    • Anchor Text
    • Avoid Keyword Stuffing
    • Include keywords in H2 and H3 heading tags to improve SEO
    • Add keywords in URLs and Permalinks

Create Link Strategy

  1. Create Backlinks
  2. Create on page and off page linking
  3. Linking to YouTube and Podcasts

Search Intent

  1. Structure your content based on Search Intent
  2. Google will crawl and index your content with ease

Mobile Friendly Website

  1. Google will use your website’s mobile version for indexing & ranking
  2. In WordPress choose a mobile responsive theme

Website Loading Speed

  1. When using WordPress use plugins to clean your cache for faster speed (WP-Rocket)
  2. By cleaning your cache it might help with website validation purposes

Domain Authority

  1. DA is a ranking metric that shows your site is expert about a particular topic and its ability to rank on search engines
  2. DA was created by MOZ. DA has a score between 1 and 100

Website Structure

  1. Run an XML sitemap and upload it onto Google Search Console for Google to crawl your website and based on your Robots.txt file to index appropriately
  2. Use Google Analytics
  3. Use Schema codes for local SEO
  4. Add a robots.txt file with sitemap

Website Security

Google wants to see all websites with an SSL certificate. This means your website needs to look: https://mysite.com

User Experience

  1. The last Google ranking factor is the overall user experience of your website
    • Use CTR (click-through-rate); It is the percentage of users that click on your website link in the SERPs Search Result Pages.
    • Bounce Rate: Monitor your bounce rate in your Google Analytics. If your bounce rate is 85-100 its bad. How is a high bounce rate determined? When visitors leave your site by using the back button or jump the site. Google will not rank your page. Best bring it down below 80. A too low bounce rate is not good either. Stay between 65-79. Keep the visitor on your pages and keep the content relevant to their searches.
    • Dwell Time: This measures how long a visitor stays on your site after coming from Google search results. The higher the dwell time, the better it is. (This ties in with bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the longer visitor stays on your page.)

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