SEO ranking factors in 2023
SEO is very important for ranking higher in google. But do you know the top SEO ranking factors?
So what is search engine optimization? The definition of search engine optimization is the process of improving and promoting a website in order to increase the number of non-paid visitors the website receives from search engines. And the key here is non-paid visitors. we’re not talking about the paid advertisements that show up at the top of Google. We’re talking about the organic links that show up at the bottom. There are a number of things, In fact, there are over 200 ranking factors that Google looks at that feed into its algorithm that determines where you rank on Google. We’re not going to cover every single one of those 200. We’re going to focus on the top 10 here in this article. And these are all things that you can actually do to your website right now. So once you finish reading this article today, you all can go on your website and actually optimize your website for all 10 of these things.
We will discuss 7 factors in this article. So, let’s get started!
1. Backlinks
The way Google works is that they have these robots that they’re actually referred to as spiders that are crawling the Internet at all times. And they are analyzing your website and every other website on the Internet. And then they’re reporting back to Google to say, hey… I found this website, it has this title tag, and it has this much content on it. It has an article. The images are about this subject, it has all text, and it reports all of this information back to Google, and then Google uses that to feed into its algorithm to determine where to rank you on the search engine results pages.
And so it’s really important to pay attention to these things because this is literally what Google is looking at when they’re analyzing your website. So if you haven’t optimized your website ever, that’s really one of the main reasons that you’re probably not ranking on the first page of Google. So one of the most important ranking factors is backlinks.
Essentially backlinks are other websites that are linking to you. So for example, if I’m an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, Maybe the New York Times food section sent out a writer to write about my restaurant and they wrote an article about me and in that article, they mentioned my website and then linked to my website.
That is a backlink. And so essentially it’s like word of mouth. But it’s a sort of digital online version of word of mouth. So the more people that you have talking about you is beneficial. Google sees that as good. It’s sort of like your score of popularity in a way, How many people are linking to you? And the quality of those backlinks matters as well. So they have to be quality backlinks and they have to be relevant backlinks.
So for example, if I get my restaurant on like example.com, it’s not really relevant, right? It’s not really in the food category So Google doesn’t treat that the same. So that’s important to consider as well. There are a number of ways to generate backlinks and we’ll get into that in a little bit. But I do want to mention right now that the one way you do not want to acquire backlinks is by buying them. You never want to buy backlinks but we’ll get ideas and how you can generate backlinks in a little bit.
2. Keywords in your metadata
A couple of the things that are really important are the keywords in your metadata. So metadata collectively refers to your title tag, your description tag, your H1 one tag, and then your text for your images and we’ll cover this in the other articles. Essentially you want to make sure that your keywords are in those areas. Every website owner can edit their own title tags and we will learn about the specifics and the actual attributes of title tags within a minute.
3. Page Load Speed
The other ranking factor is page load speed. you want to make sure that your page and your website are loading quickly. Not only is that a bad thing for search engines but it’s a bad user experience And in fact, if your website is not loading within three seconds, a majority of people, I think over 50% of people, will decide to leave your website if it’s not loading within three seconds. So that’s a big deal. That’s an easy way to increase your conversions is to simply get more people on your website. If you can just increase the speed of your website that’s going to help you out dramatically. It’s also a ranking factor. So Google looks at this too and they say that if your website is not loading quickly, it’s a bad user experience but you’re going to get deranked because of that as well.
So you really want to pay attention to your page speed and I’ll show you guys a tool. It’s a free tool that you can use to find out how quickly your website is loading called Website Score.
4. Domain age
Another one on here is your domain age. Unfortunately, this is not one that people can really control because if you think about it, you bought your domain when you bought it. The older the domain the better obviously. So if you bought it 20 years ago, that’s fantastic. But you can’t really go back in time and acquire a domain name in the past. So if you bought your domain name yesterday, you have to kind of deal with that. So that is a ranking factor though.
So if you do have an old domain that you’ve you’ve been that’s been sitting on the shelf for a while, it’s actually better probably to use that one than it is to use one that you just acquired.
5. Keyword in your domain
So consider that also a keyword in your domain. So if you’re an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn again that domain could contain “restaurant” or it could contain “Brooklyn” or it could contain “pizza and pasta”, that type of thing. including the keywords that you’re trying to rank for is a really smart idea to include in your domain name. I don’t recommend changing your whole brand. If you’ve already been established for many years,
I’m not suggesting that you should go out and find a new domain just because I said that you have to like have your keyword in there. But the fact is if you are considering buying a domain now and you’re just starting out, that is something you should consider to do is to put your keyword in the domain name.
6. Domain penalties
Google looks at this as well. So if you’ve acquired backlinks in the past you’ve paid for them and google found out about that, you could be penalized by Google. So what’s really interesting about this is in the early days of search engine optimization, there was what we referred to as black Hat SEO and it’s still prevalent today but not as many people used to try to outrank and sort of their competitors and try and outsmart Google and very a variety of ways. So for example,
one of those ways was that they would, in the early days of the internet, they would actually try to get as much traffic as possible. And one way to do that was to rank for a variety of keywords.
So let’s say you’re a seller of toys online like you sell kids’ toys online. If you wanted to acquire a bunch of traffic, one way you could do that if you were engaged in black Hat SEO is to put a bunch of keywords on your website, in white text on a white background. So Google would think this is like in the late nineties, early two thousand’s, Google would think that your website is about all of those keywords. And so people got away with that for a period of time. Google found out that they would penalize that website. And the worst-case scenario you might actually get blacklisted and never show up on Google again. So definitely do not do that.
That’s one example of black hat SEO. The other example of black hat SEO is actually buying backlinks, that’s not a good idea, or paying for traffic to your site. Those are highly unethical things and Google will find out about that stuff if you’re doing it. So definitely don’t do it because you do not want to get penalized. It’s hard to recover from a penalty. Oftentimes it takes years. Sometimes I’ve seen clients that actually have to buy a new domain name and start their business from scratch.
That’s a very difficult position to be in. So try and stay away from anything black-hat SEO.
7. Secure SSL or HTTPS
The other one here is secure SSL or HTTPS So you want to make sure that your website is secure. This is a recent development as of July 2018. So if your website is not HTTPS meaning that it does not have an SSL you need to enable that on your website, Website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress. They make it pretty easy to do that stuff. So right within your admin section, you can actually enable HTTPS, which is a ranking factor. Google is looking at that stuff.
Conclusion
Without visitors, a website has no value. So gaining visitors is the most important part of a website. All we do in our website is for gaining visitors. SEO is the only weapon for gaining visitors. So you know how important it is! I have discussed the top 7 factors among 200+ factors, So you can say that I have discussed the most important factors. Try these and I hope you will achieve what you want. Stay tuned, and be with WordPress Journal.
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