In SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there are more than 200 different factors that impact our website ranking in Search engines. It is beneficial to improve all those SEO elements that help us to get better ranking in Search engine results, whereas some SEO ranking factors are more important than others.
In this blog, we are going through all the most important SEO factors for better rankings that you should focus on if you’re new to SEO or just started blogging or want high traffic to your site. These factors can give you a high impact in ranking to your website in search engines.
Important SEO factors
There are two important factors of SEO and they are categorized as
- On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Off-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization): On-Page SEO refers to the things that we can control and perform within the website.
Off-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Off-Page SEO refers to the activities that we perform outside of our website, and we can’t control them directly.
On-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Below are the most important On-Page SEO factors:
1. Crawling and Indexing
Crawling and indexing are the most important factors in On-Page SEO. If your site doesn’t get crawled by search engine bot, then it cannot show up in search engines. So, the first thing to do in On-Page SEO is to get your website indexed and crawled by Google.
What is Crawling?
Crawling is the process by which Google or any other search engine discover your webpages by sending robots or crawlers to crawl your website and find new and updated content. Google discover new pages through links.
What is indexing?
After crawling your website, these bots send data to Google, and depending upon your keywords and index or no index value, Google then adds it to their search engine database. No index means that your page doesn’t get added to the search engine database. This process is called Indexing.
The easiest way to get your site Crawled and indexed is to:
Submit a Sitemap: A Sitemap map is simply a list of URLs of all your important pages that helps crawlers to find content on a website and tell the search engine how to reach it. Submitting a sitemap in a webmaster or Search console helps your site gets crawled and indexed easily.
Internal links: As we mentioned earlier that Google discovers new pages or contents through links so, if your pages are well interlinked together, it helps Google to find new content. And it is important to link all your internal pages as it also helps in ranking.
Robots.txt file: This file tells crawlers which pages to crawls and which files not to crawl. Make sure to give the right information to crawlers.
2. Quality Content
We all have heard “Content is King” and Google also gives high priority to websites that have high or rich quality content on their webpages as it gives users the information they are looking for. So, it is the most important factor in SEO. If your website has high-quality content, then it gets better ranking in Google search, as it gives users a better experience, and Google ranking factors are now based on user experience.
Give your users accurate, fact-based, and useful information on topics they are searching to achieve better rankings. Make sure to check the plagiarism of your content using these 10 best free plagiarism checker tools.
Things that cause Google to think that your content is thin content or spammy:
Duplicate Content
Keyword Stuffed in Content
Doorway Pages
Auto-Generated Content
3. Keywords
Earlier websites used to have keywords stuffed in their pages to get higher ranking in Google searches and, it also worked then. But after Google algorithm updates, these practices can harm your website ranking.
However, search engines look more than just keywords to understand the webpages but still, keywords are one of the most important SEO factors.
On a webpage, you must have keywords in your Heading, Title tag, meta description. There are not any certain rules to follow but on average you can use your keywords once in 100 words in your content.
The most important thing is to ensure that your keywords sound natural and boost the user experience rather than weaken them.
4. Search Intent
Search Intent is the term or keyword that users used to specify the purpose of an online search. You must understand the search intent of your keywords.
For some keywords, search intents are simpler than others. To find the search intent of a keyword, search Google for the best results to see the needs of a keyword.
Types of Search Intents
There are commonly four types of search intents:
- Informational intent
- Navigational intent
- Transactional intent
- Commercial investigation
5. E-A-T
It is an SEO factor in the Google algorithm first introduced in 2014 and later gained importance in “Search Quality Guidelines” in 2018.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness in search engine optimization.
It is very important in website ranking, especially for those websites that may affect someone’s health and financial situation.
Let’s understand each part of E-A-T.
Expertise: This represents that author has comprehensive knowledge on a topic. Your content must show your expertise or professional experience and knowledge about the topic like healthcare.
Authoritativeness: It represents that you’re an expert on the given topic, which builds the authoritativeness of your website. Like, links and shares from high authority websites or mentioned by well-known people.
Trustworthiness: Secure websites with positive reviews and accurate information makes users trust them and have confidence in their content. This shows the trustworthiness of a site.
Off-Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Here are some important Off-page SEO Factors for better rankings
6. Backlinks
Backlinks are also known as inbound links or incoming links from other sites to our websites or pages. Google and other search engines think backlinks as “votes” to a specific webpage or site. It is also one of the important factors of SEO for better ranking.
Search engines consider high-quality backlinks. So, you have to create more backlinks from high authority sites to rank higher in search results. Websites with a high number of links have a higher organic ranking.
Important things to consider while building backlinks:
Avoid building links from bad reputation sites or sites with a high spam score.
Do not buy links or get links to your sites in comments on other sites.
Write Guest Post and share them on third party websites and get a link to your site in your post.
Avoid backlinks that are not from a similar niche.
Do not build a lot of backlinks in a short time that looks spammy to Google.
Always use your targeted keyword as Anchor Text.
7. Social Sharing
Social Sharing does not impact the ranking factors directly, but it can help you get tons of traffic to your website or blogs.
The more people share your post or page in social media, Google considers as a positive signal and, you can get more backlinks to your page or site.
Things to do to create powerful social sharing content:
Always write about topics related to your niche and trending on social media.
Create a catchy and share-worthy title for your content.
Add social media share buttons on the website to make it easy to share your content.
Post regularly on social media to build a relationship with your followers.
Always share content from your business account on social media.
