by Robert Long | May 4, 2016 | Online Marketing, SEO, Web Development
Optimize your website in 2018 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 amount of time visitors spend 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 Lahaul Seth | Dec 2, 2012 | Advice, Blogging, Google, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
For many years Google has been using PageRank (PR) to classify sites based on authority. A higher PR site generally means higher authority and higher crawl rate by search engines. Google has been fighting against spam and black hat techniques since its very beginning. Earlier, any webmaster would gain backlinks either by buying links, commenting on other blogs, or by spam guest posting and increase their PR. Now Google is bringing a new card into the SEO game – Google Author Rank.
What is Google Author Rank?
Google Author Rank is nothing but a measurement of the authority of your blog / website over the internet. Google has been trying to provide their customers with better search results ever since it’s birth and this how they are going to do it. They normally update their search algorithms over 500 times a year (lots of minor updates and some major ones). The recent Panda and EMD (Exact Matching Domains) updates have hit many webmasters hard. The Penguin algorithm has hit most of the spam sites with devastating effects and if you are one of them, you should read the rest of the article.
Many SEO experts have complained about their organic traffic disappearing overnight. Google with their recent updates have changed the very definition of Search Engine Optimization. No one knows what to do anymore. But what everyone knows (even if they don’t apply it) is producing unique, original and useful content is the only way to avoid being penalized by these updates.
Why you have to go for Google Authorship?
You have to go for Google Authorship because Google wants you to. Google is the world leader in search marketing. With over 80% dominance in the search market, you have no choice but to stay on the Google’s good boy list. Organic traffic is the lifeline of any blog or website. To get organic traffic, you need Google and you have to listen to what they are saying.
What are the benefits of Google Authorship?
Google Authorship will provide more authority to your blog. Your Google+ picture will be displayed in the search results which increases the CTR of your blog.
There is also a hidden benefit of it which has been confirmed by Google themselves. If someone clicks a link on the search result and goes to your site and spends a certain amount of time there, then presses the browser’s “Back” button, more results from your site will be shown in the results. This is a way of Google knowing that the user has loved your content and is willing to read more from your site.
According to Matt McGee of Search Engine Land, their research has calculated the time to be around 2 minutes. Here’s a snapshot (above) of the results after pressing the back button after a certain amount of time.
How to get Google Authorship?
To get Google Authorship, you need to connect your blog with your Google+ account. If you still haven’t done it or don’t know how to, you can check out these tutorials (for Blogger | for WordPress) which both provide a simple step on how to do that. Just a few days ago, I received my official notification from Google on being accepted into the Google Authorship Program.
How Author Rank will be calculated?
Like PageRank, the author rank would also be calculated using a series of complex signals that are received by Google. Well, according to Mike Arnesen of SEOmoz, some of the main factors that are going to be considered are:
• PageRank of the author’s content
• Number of comments on each post
• Google+ shares of author content
• Number of Google+ circles the author is in
• Social Media Followers (e.g. Twitter , Facebook , Stumbleupon)
• Connections with other high author rank authors
How Author Rank will be implemented?
Google will take into account the PR of the author’s content and the factors above that I have mentioned and then combine with the Author Rank to give the best possible results to its customers. For years Google has been using PR to determine the authority of the websites. But, as we all know, PR can be manipulated by using black hat SEO techniques. This author rank is supposed to help Google bring to the top more relevant and good quality content, so those who are using black hat and spam link building techniques are surely going to be hit by these pretty badly.
When will this Author Rank come into play?
Well, no one knows exactly when the Author Rank will come into play or if it has already started playing in the background and we haven’t noticed yet. Whether Google has already implemented this or not, it doesn’t matter. You should start concentrating on building your author rank now. Start producing quality content and forget about the spam guest posting and black hat techniques (if you have been doing so).
How can I build my Author Rank?
Building your Author Rank is a little bit different than that of building your authority (which you have done so far). I’m just going to list out some of the critical points:
• Start socializing with other reputable bloggers
• Connect with other webmasters on social networking sites (e.g. Twitter , Facebook , LinkedIn)
• Start sharing your content on the social media (if you haven’t been doing so)
• Start using Google+ more
• Get in the circles of the reputable bloggers
• Start guest posting on high authority sites
• Start commenting on high authority sites
Well, that’s about it. So, are you planning to build author rank or what? What do you think about this? You can hit the comment section to share your views.
The above post was written by Lahaul Seth of Blog Tips Codes. He writes about blogging, SEO, and Internet marketing, and often gives away free code (such as his free version of Hello Bar), so make sure you check him out.
