by Robert Long | May 4, 2016 | Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Web Design, Web Development
Google RankBrain SEO Optimize your website in 2021 by having quality content and building links from high authority websites – these are 2 of the 200+ factors Google looks at!
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and has the aim of putting a website in the first position with Google. It’s like a strange race, as everyone wants to be first for their own keywords and people approach it in many different ways.
Google’s Andrey Lipattsev announced in March 2016 that on-page content and link building are joint first in importance in Google’s algorithm, with RankBrain (their artificial intelligence algorithm) third. This means that for a website to reach Google’s first page of results, it needs to:
- Have great on-page content with good quality text.
- Have high-quality links coming into the site from high authority websites.
- Include the judicious use of keywords and fulfill other criteria that the RankBrain algorithm looks at.
There are at least 200 major Google ranking factors, see www.indigoextra.com/200-website-ranking-factors-google-seo, with some saying that there are actually over 10,000 factors in total, so how can you optimize a website for all these multitudes of different factors?
As Google evolves and particularly with the introduction of the RankBrain algorithm, optimizing a website for search engines has become closer and closer to optimizing it for human beings, with a few important differences.
Some factors Google look at are quality and length of content, the number of time visitors spends on a page, whether visitors quickly click back, then click a different result in their search engine, does the number of visitors increase over time, does the page include at least one image, etc.
To optimize for these on-page aspects, it’s essential to write content that is well researched, a decent length, and offers something unique to the people reading it. Don’t just think of reaching a certain word count, but be sure that you, or your SEO company, write content that actually engages the reader, that you yourself would enjoy reading and that includes something original. The unique text is a given, but unique content, with unique ideas presented in an original way, is what’s needed to grab your readers’ attention.
Similarly, with link building, the links that will give you the most benefit are the links that will also drive the most traffic to your website. A link from an original article in the form of a guest blog on a high authority site will drive a lot more traffic to your site than a link from an obscure social media portal no-one uses, whereas links from Facebook and Twitter are social media platforms that everyone has heard of and which will carry more weight.
It helps if some of the links include the anchor text that you want to rank high for, however, it’s important that the links are natural enough, therefore don’t be tempted to use keywords in every single anchor text – a healthy mixture of keywords, the URL, and phrases like ‘click here’ works best.
Finally, those other 200 or 10,000 factors we mentioned! Google RankBrain’s job is to sort through all the different factors and decide which ones are truly important, test them out and constantly refine them (over 500 times a year). They include things like having a responsive web design, so your site looks good on any device, ensuring that your page speed loads reasonably fast, making good use of meta tags and ALT tags, and including illustrations or photos on your site.
If you focus on quality content and quality links, then you’re 2/3 of the way there and a well-designed website and guidance from an SEO expert will help you win the SEO race.
by Robert Long | Sep 22, 2014 | Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tutorials
How many times did you feel your annoyance grow proportionally to the amount of time you had to wait for a website to load? Often enough. And you’re not the only one – a website’s load time can have a huge impact on how users perceive the brand and its products or services. Ensuring a swift upload of your website is one of your main tasks – here are some guidelines on how to do this and never get annoyed by a long load time again. (more…)
by Robert Long | Feb 11, 2013 | Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
If you want your website to stand out from among your competitors, simply writing articles will not be enough to accomplish what you desire. Your articles must be SEO friendly. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means it is optimized to rank high on search engine return lists. There are a few points within your article that will make it SEO friendly, and here are the top things you need to know.
by Robert Long | Sep 20, 2012 | Explained, Online Marketing, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization
I recently signed up for the Daily Blog Tips Newsletter and received a tip about Google PageRank that I had no idea about, so now I’m here to share that tip with you…
What Is Google Page Rank?
Page Rank is Google’s numerical value that they assign each website on the Internet. This value is a whole number (no decimals) between 0 (PR0) and 10 (PR10), 0 being that the website is new or not linked to, and 10 being a super authority. PageRank is updated every three or four months and is recalculated every time.
While PageRank could be meaningless to the average Internet user, it has a great importance to bloggers, Internet marketers, and website flippers. PageRank can determine how much advertisements on your site should cost (for example, a PR6 site should charge more for ads than a PR2 site), the authority of a source, and even your Google search results (a PR5 website is more likely to show at the top of Google than a PR1 site).
How Page Rank Is Calculated
While nobody knows the in-depth, full equation to Google’s PageRank algorithm, some people know the general idea. PageRank is calculated by the amount of incoming links a website has. You could have an awesome website with 20,000 daily views and over 300 comments a day, but if nobody links to you, you’ll never advance past PR0.
The term that is often used when describing the value of a particular link is “link juice”. Similar to the juice in a battery, link juice determines the power that will be shared with the linked-to site.
So here’s how it’s calculated… Let’s say you have a website that has a PageRank of 6 (PR6). On that website contains only three outgoing links to PR0 sites. When Google does a PageRank update, they split your PageRank into link juice and divide it among the websites you link to. In this case, the PR6 would be divided by three (because the site links to three other sites) and shared with the other sites – each earning PR2. After the PageRank update, that PR6 website would cause each of the PR0 sites to become PR2. Of course, the algorithm is way more complex than this, but this is the general concept.
How To Increase Your PageRank
Now that we know how PageRank works, how would you go about increasing it?
- Link to your own posts – sharing the link juice isn’t limited to just external websites. If you have a particular post with PR4 (like this one), each link within that post will be sharing link juice – both to external websites and my own.
- Guest post – Guest posting is the act of writing a blog post to be featured on another site. Often times, blog owners will allow a link back to your own blog, which helps with building your PageRank. You can view my guidelines for guest posting here.
- Submit to directories – There are many directories that have high PageRank that you can submit your blog to. Not only will these help in link building, but they will also increase the amount of viewers to your site. Make sure to check out the DoFollow Blog Directory!
- Comment on blogs – If you can find blogs that use the CommentLuv plugin, each dofollow link will send your site link juice. Wait, what is dofollow?
There are numerous other ways to increase your PageRank, but they all go back to generating more and more incoming links to your website.
Disclaimer: It’s Not That Easy
My example that I used above with the PR6 websites making the three PR0 websites turn into PR2 after just one update was great for understanding how the calculations work, but it was not realistic at all. I don’t know a single PR6 website on the planet that only has three outgoing links. These outgoing links can be – navigation, sidebar links such as blogrolls, affiliate banners in the sidebar, links in the body of the blog post, a related posts widget, CommentLuv links in the comments, and links in the website footer. I would say that the average PR6 site probably has about 30-40 links on a page, which makes each one have a link juice power of about 0.2. This means that you will need 10 incoming links from PR6 sites (that have 30-40 links per page) to bring your website up to PR2. Of course, this is not 100% accurate because I do not know the full Google algorithm, but you can get the idea that growing your PageRank isn’t easy or quick.
The Key Is Persistance
If you keep trying and commit to building one link a day, your PageRank will increase with each update (every 3-4 months). Remember you can build links by commenting on blogs, submitting to directories, guest posting, and linking to your own content. If you comment on one blog every day and only earn 0.06 points of link juice, after three months of doing this consistently, your blog will earn 6 points, thus making it PR6.
