What’s a top Google position made of? Here are the 8 major points that make all the difference.
It’s no secret that Google’s ranking algorithm is made up of over 200 components, or “signals.” And while the list is impressive, it can get daunting if you’re a just regular human with 24 hours in a day.
Backlinks
Backlinks are the strongest indication of authority
to Google. Let’s look at the things that can make or break yours.
1. Link score
How does Google turn the abstract concept of
“backlinks” into a quantifiable ranking signal? In several patents, Google explains that this is done
by calculating a “link score.” The score is made up by every incoming link’s
individual quality score (aka PageRank) and the number of links to the site.
So link quantity is an important part of the
score. However, remember that you can’t afford to have spammy, low-quality
links in 2017. It’s also worth noting that links coming from the same domain
carry little weight; Google will typically only count one of them when
evaluating your link profile. So in terms of quantity, your primary factor to
focus on should be the number of linking domains.
Measuring quality is less straightforward.
While we know that PageRank is still one of the key factors in
Google’s algorithm, its public version is no longer available. Luckily, there
are reliable alternatives that are based on PageRank’s original formula,
including SEO PowerSuite’s recently launched InLink Rank.
2.
Anchor text relevance (but not too much of it)
Anchor text is another part of the “backlinks”
concept that matters for rankings. Much like the content on your pages, your
backlinks’ anchors tell Google what your page is about — and what it should
rank for. Of course, you’ve got to remember about Penguin and keep your
anchors diverse and natural; it’s all about striking the right balance.
How to optimize:
Checking
on your SEO competitors’ links is a good way to understand what kind of link scores you are competing against, and how much
work it’ll take to catch up. To do this, you’ll need a tool that
lets you compare several sites’ link profiles against numerous criteria.
Content
- Keyword usage
Your title remains the
strongest relevance signal to Google. Using keywords or variations in the title tag is still important
in 2017 (the closer to the beginning, the better). The meta description
can also boost relevance, although it carries less weight. Finally, don’t
forget about using keywords in the page’s body, remembering that the H1 tag
holds the most SEO weight out of all headings.
- Length
In its search
quality guidelines, Google mentions that the amount of a page’s
content is important for its overall quality — and therefore rankings. Clearly, there’s no ideal content
length to aim for; as Google puts it, “the amount of content necessary for the
page to be satisfying depends on the topic and purpose of the page.”
For a realistic
reference on the “satisfying amount” of content, look at the pages that already
rank well for your keywords, and learn from their strategies.
- Comprehensiveness
RankBrain (launched in
October 2015) forms part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm and, according to Google, is involved in every query. One of
RankBrain’s functions is analyzing results with good user satisfaction metrics
and identifying their common features — features that make them good search
results.
Technical SEO
The technical foundation
of your site is crucial for SEO (and well beyond). Here are the top two factors
that matter for rankings.
- Page speed
Google expects pages
to load in two seconds or less, and they’ve officially confirmed that
speed is a ranking signal. Speed also has a massive impact on UX: slower
pages have higher
bounce rates and lower conversion rates.
The most common culprits
for poor speed are uncompressed resources: scripts, images and CSS files.
- Mobile-friendliness
If your pages aren’t
optimized for smartphones, they won’t rank in mobile search at all. With over half of
Google queries coming from mobile devices, that’s not something you can put up
with in 2017.
User experience
The debate around the
use of behavioral factors in ranking has been on for years. But in Google’s
own words, “searching users are
often the best judges of relevance, so that if they select a particular search result, it is
likely to be relevant, or at least more relevant than the presented
alternatives.”
- Click-through rate
A SERP (search engine
results page) click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of the number of times a search
listing was clicked to
the number of times it was displayed to searchers. Numerous patents filed by Google
focus on CTR as a ranking signal. SearchMetrics’ study even
found that CTR has the highest correlation with
rankings out of all factors examined.
True, correlation
doesn’t equal causation. But it’s hard to argue with real-life
experiments showing that a CTR increase almost immediately
results in a ranking boost.
Conclusion
SEO
is a complex, multidimensional, ever-evolving science. It’s only natural that
you can’t afford to focus on every detail; and you don’t have to, either. If
you prioritize your efforts, focus on the eight factors above you will get good
position in Google.
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