Top 6 Google Ranking Factors

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a forever growing field that has evolved and continues to evolve as each day passes. While Google’s objective remains consistent, of putting the best content at the top of their search engine, each year, Google will add a new algorithm or feature that makes this task more complex or sometimes much easier. That said, today, keeping up with the constant improvements and changes in the search engines is so important, if you want to remain relevant.

Below you will find 6 of the most important ranking factors for the Google search engine. 

1. High Quality Content

Google’s algorithm is designed to reward content that is both relevant and comprehensive, content that answers the query of the user. You want your content to be relevant, useful and go into enough detail that it provides the user with all the answers they need. The objective is to avoid them clicking away from your page.

There are several ways that you can do this. You can ask for help, get someone neutral to read your content and give feedback, or you can do it yourself. The idea being, you reading the content and asking yourself whether it fulfils its primary objective of answering the main query you intend it to rank on.

If you want your content to rank high in Google’s Search Engine, then you need to ensure that your content properly, effectively and efficiently answers the question(s) it sets out to do. You also don’t want to forget the formatting guidelines laid out by Google themselves. There are many on-page factors for you to consider in this regard.

Most people, when they stumble upon a page, they don’t want to come face to face with a huge chunk of unformatted content. Thus, you want to structure your content, by breaking it up, into paragraphs, bullet points etc., so that it’s easier to read. It should be eligible enough for someone to skim through it, and get a general idea of what is being said in it.

2. Backlinks

When it comes to Google’s ranking signals, backlinks are still just as important today as they were when the engine was first created. The more high quality links you have, that means, links from websites and domains with a lot of authority, the higher your site will rank in the search engines. It’s also advisable that you pay at least some attention to your sites backlink profile. As you don’t want any spammy links, or a scenario where you have hundreds of links from low quality sites using the same anchor text.

3. Mobile Ready

Google announced that their Search Engine would switch to mobile-first indexing in 2016. This means that the search engine prioritises its mobile search engine over the desktop one. In the past, this obviously wasn’t the case. However, as time passed, more and more people started to get on the internet via their mobile phones, and thus, used Google’s search engines through it. It’s for this reason Google decided that it would make sense that the version of their engine that got the most views should become their priority.

If we look at the search engine today, we find there has been some changes in it, due to the mobile-first algorithmic change, especially when looking at local results. Users are now able to receive results that are more finely tuned to their location.

4. Keyword Optimization

Besides creating high quality content and getting backlinks to it, one ranking factor that is equally as important, is the keywords you use for the content.

A keyword is basically the term the user types into the search engine when looking for content. If you want your content to rank on your target keyword, then you need to ensure that the keyword features prominently in the content itself. This way, Google will know that the content is relevant to the keyword it is attempting to rank on.

5. Website Structure

While the optimisation of your keywords is very important, the structure of your website is another ranking factor that you must also consider. Especially for newly launched websites.

The architecture of the site is very important, as it determines the search engines ability to both index and crawl the website. If the site is well structured, then the search engine will have little difficulty finding the various pages that make up the site.

This means a website that Google’s crawlers or spiders are able to navigate through, and discover new content, as and when you make it available.

Another method you can use to make your site more navigable by the search engines is to optimise your robots.txt file

Robots.txt is a small file saved on your website that you can use to instruct and direct Google’s bots. Telling them which pages on your site they can crawl, and which they cannot. It helps a great deal, when you indicate to the bots which pages you want them to crawl.

This way bots are able to crawl your site much faster, which in turn will save the bots from unnecessarily crawling and attempting to index the wrong pages. 

6. HTTPS

HTTPS became an official Google ranking factor way back in 2014, when they first announced it on their official webmaster blog. Of course, they notified webmasters beforehand, that they would be implementing it as a ranking factor, just so people would have enough time to make the transition.

Google states that security had now become a main priority of theirs. As they hoped that not only would their services but also the web sites that feature in their search engine would use the latest in security technologies. With HTTPS encryption becoming the standard.

This means end users that now hop onto Google’s search engine, as well as their other services, such as Google Drive and Gmail, will now access these things through a secure connection. Google also took it a step further by adding a warning within the browser Google Chrome, which indicates a website is insecure if it does not have HTTPS on it.

Though, from the various tests conducted, there hasn’t been any real impact, from an SEO perspective for websites that choose to migrate over the HTTPS encryption, it’s still very important that you adopt it, as you never know what the future holds for Google, and also because that trust factor can have a positive effect on conversions (for those webmasters that sell products on their sites).

–AUTHOR INFO—

Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website www.compuchenna.co.uk.