8 Most Essential Google Ranking Factors for a Website
Ranking on Google is one of the top priorities for every website owner. If you are not ranked high, you are not going to get much business out of your site.
Google’s algorithm is so often updated that any mistake can take your website to the bottom of the page ranking. To prevent that, here are 8 essential Google ranking factors for a website.
1. Responsive Web Design
When following this philosophy on web design and development, you don’t just adapt your website to the device your audience may be using at the moment; you make sure only one URL is shown in the search engine results. This saves your website from multiple redirecting and the errors derived from this.
You will also avoid inconveniences such as malfunctioning of social links, which occur depending on the device from which the URL was shared and the one that is trying to access it. For website owners that are just starting, these factors, along with using the best shared hosting according to their needs, are essential to online success.
2. Website Loading Speed
In 2010, Google announced its decision of including site speed as a factor to rank your website on its search result page. Good website response to web requests is an essential factor to the user experience. If a website offers a slow experience, users may get bored and spend their precious time somewhere else.
A faster site also reduces operating costs. One of the ways a website optimizes its speed is utilizing Content Distribution Networks (CDN, like WordPresscdn) to deliver the same content to visitors regardless of their location. With WordPress sites, for example, you can find at least one affordable CDN you can benefit from. CDNs help improve the availability, speed, and performance of your site and they are very easy and fast to setup.
3. Internal Site Linking
A good internal site linking structure can make your users stay longer on your website, it can also increase the interest in your content and decrease the number of occasions a user exits your website too early, pressing the back button on his browser.
4. Backlinks
Backlinks, also called inbound links, are links external to your domain that redirect users to your website. They are, to this day, the most robust and important way of enhancing your search engine ranking. Backlinking gives your site reputation and gets your name out there. It can be harmful to your ranking health when done in a deceitful way (like buying backlinking from other sites). Nowadays, the latest search engine algorithms can detect this backlinking and then lower your website ranking.
5. Content Quality
People will consume your quality content and, if they happen to like it, they will link to your site so all their associates can enjoy it too.
The quality of your content is essential because a satisfied audience will always bring more people to your content. Some people may interconnect with another niche of people, and the different and increasingly diverse public will add into the equation. Those kinds of connections are becoming more important as the search engine bots are improving the way they understand websites and language. So, essentially, content quality is the most natural way of improving your website ranking!
6. Domain Factors
The history of your domain is essential to Google. If, for example, a domain was formerly penalized or deindexed from the Google results, it will matter during the time you own it. The age of a domain is also taken into account, but it’s of smaller importance. Domains from decades ago do not benefit that much in the Google ranking. It’s much more important, for example, that the domain has not lost many backlinks over its history.
7. Avoid Duplicate Content
Despite the fact that almost a third of the web is duplicated content, the content of your website should not have an excessive amount of duplicated information to be considered valuable by Google. You should not republish content in the same exact way others originally presented it. Otherwise, Google bots will rank your content below the original.
Sometimes, however, the content of your page could look like it’s duplicated to Google automated systems. This should not worry you too much. If, for example, you have a news website with different domain suffixes for two versions of the same content, it will not be treated as spam by Google. However, you must take into account that those sites may be ranked differently by Google.
8. Social Media Promotion
Social media is an excellent way to elevate the Google ranking of your site. Since social media websites allow you to post links by means of creating an account, they are an excellent source of backlinks.
[guest post by Sabrina Báez]
