Initial Elaboration of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Before heading towards the factors that play a key role in Website Rankings, it is convenient to know what SEO actually is. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a partial art and partial science of optimizing one’s web pages to be found by the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing etc.
But the question is why partly art and partly science? The science part of SEO deals with technology and all the engineering and technicalities of a website such as code, information architecture and user experience. While the art includes the creativity in contents that drives the traffic to the website.
Ranking in SEO
In SEO, ranking denotes your content’s position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). A #1 ranking determines that when people search for a particular term related to your site, your web page is the first result.
Appearing in the top 3 results is outstanding, for the reason that almost half of the clicks on any search results page go to those positions. On the very first page, within the top 10 results, is also useful because 95% of people never make it past the first page. As a decision maker, you can get SEO done in house or hire an SEO agency.
Top 7 SEO Factors That Play an Important Role in Website Ranking
The ranking plays a vital role for your website traffic acquisition, which ensures more leads and sales by more and more traffic due to the well optimization of the website.
SEO requirements are unstable and therefore keep on changing and can prove to be hard for you to cope with the latest website developments and the needed improvements. But if you neglect SEO, not a single person will be able to find your site, which means your all hard work will be ruined and you’ll get nothing for it.
To dominate your search, let’s go into the important SEO ranking factors. At the end, you will be able to well-optimize your site that brings more business and put a smile on your face. Vola!
Crawlable and Secure URL
A right kind of URL is the first and foremost thing to cope with, in order to increase the ranking of the website. It is needed that the Google bots or any other search engine bots be able to visit the page, understand the content in a readable text format, and realize the images and visuals that are present on the page so that they put into their web index.
This is really a crucial thing to adopt otherwise the rest of the things won’t matter at all. To assist the bots a robots.txt file is needed that tells Google where it will be able to look for the information of your site. In addition, a sitemap is also needed which lists all your pages. You can take benefit from WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO, which is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search-engine friendly whether you are running a personal blog or managing a website for a client.
With more variations on the horizon to clearly flag sites as secure or not secure, that signal will affect visitors’ opinion of your site, and impending search engine ranking. If you haven’t up till now enabled SSL or HTTPS security on your website, do it immediately.
Speed – Fast Loading and Mobile Friendly Pages
Now the people have no leisure to wait for your website take a while to open. The speed of the page is, therefore, cited as one of the key factor contributing to website ranking from a number of years. The users’ experience can only be improved by fast-loading web pages, which particularly is a real want of Google or any search engine.
There are some pages which don’t open in a mobile device, yet can be cited on the desktop. But one must keep in mind that mobile-friendliness is also a chief factor of SEO ranking. In the past few years it has been observed that most of the people use mobile devices to access web instead of a desktop, and this has added in the alteration of results that Google has made in the ranks.
Google is now drawing its results from mobile-optimized sites first, which is regarded as the mobile-first index of Google. And if your site is deprived of this optimization you are at the risk of being excluded.
Qualitative and Superstructured Content
Content is one of the most important SEO ranking factor as it contributes a lot. It is the base to catch the traffic towards the site. You have to consider it seriously that the quality of your site’s content should meet to the targeted audience. Your content needs to appropriate in the sense that it refers to a specified audience to make a positive impact on the people.
Keep in mind this thing that you are not writing an essay, therefore, the language used in the content must be professional and accurate; without any grammatical or spelling mistakes. The text must be arranged under suitable headings and sub-headings, focussing on a single topic. Don’t let your content to leave the track and maintain a level of focus.
Remember, you are doing business, to attract the attention of the people, it is mandatory your content should highlight the benefits of the service you are providing, rather than focussing on how great your business is offering that product.
Intellectual use of appropriate Keywords and their optimization
Keywords are the words or phrases that are common, striking the mind of almost all people, used in the search engines to find which service you provide. It also occupies key importance in website ranking. The most effective the keywords are, the more are the chances of an increased rank of the website.
For instance, if one is offering a cargo service from UK to Pakistan, the keywords may be “send cargo to Pakistan” etc. So, it can be said that the keyword optimization is making sure that your content involves enough instances of the keywords.
The intellectual use of Keywords is very important, therefore, you should get assistance from online keywords tools and analysers. The traffic can be attracted by building out less competitive terms, if your site is just new. You need to use keywords repeatedly throughout the whole content which must conquer 2 to 5 percent of the whole content.
Be that as it may, using your desired keywords can chore the audience, thus an attractive and enjoyable content and the keywords ensure the increment in the rank of your website.
Technical SEO
Having said that getting a right code is one aspect of optimizing content for enhancing search engine rankings. Some technical things in this regard include the use of keywords in titles of the page due to which Google determines the relevance of the content to search.
Use header tags to show content chain of command. If your title is formatted as h1, then you can use h2 or h3 for subheads. The description should be as to attract the readers and involves the keywords. In a nutshell, the description should be concise and complete. Use your desire keywords in a text alternative that is alt tags to show how the pictures are relevant to the written content. When you find it suitable, use Schema mark-up to help the search engines return more informative results for you.
Social Shares can enhance the ranking of Website
The worth of your content can be enhanced if people start it to share on the social networking sites. A study has revealed that social shares directly enhance the search engine ranking. Although, links form some authoritative websites carry more weight than the links from social media like Facebook and Twitter but this fact cannot be denied that the highest ranking pages in Google search results have a lot of shares.
The reason is very simple, the more your content is shared on social sites, the more eyes would pass over it and they will definitely link to it. It assists to a great extent not directly but to a great extent, indirectly. You need to have a presence in social media, which make it easy for you to share your content and magnify those social signals.