How many times you have heard about the importance of SEO to increase traffic to your website and The Google SEO Ranking Factors you need to be aware of? And you wonder which one to follow and learn from?
Worry not. I would suggest you find one or two, the most three factors which you can start with and work on it few months to see the result. After getting success, then move on to the other factors which you think will give you further boost in your traffic. By doing one-step at a time, you learn by doing.
Here are those SEO Ranking Factors you need to understand:
- Keyword in the Title Page
- Keyword in the Link Anchor Text
- Fast Page Loading Speed
- No Plagiarism
- Mobile Friendly
- Don’t Use Stop Word
- Social Media Marketing
Keywords in the <title> page
This is one of the internal ranking factors which you can control directly. When you do it right, your ranking in the SERP will become much better. Your page title should reflect what is being written in your content, just like the title I have chosen for this article.
The title need to be relevant to your page copy and the words found in the <title> tag must also be found in the page itself.
Use Keyword Tool in Wealthy Affiliate to search for keywords that have high searches and less QSR competition.
Keywords in the Link Anchor Text
Use relevance keywords in your link anchor text to get higher ranking. Google will find your site more easily and it is an effective way to get more inbound links. You may use different variations of anchor text to get more hits from different combinations of keywords.
Create Link Anchor Text for your visitors, not for the search engines. Therefore, do it naturally and let the readers feel comfortable reading your contents.
Page Loading Speed
Page speed is crucial to your SEO and you can make use of Google developer’s tool to check your score. Following the suggestion to fix the problems once you have completed the Page Speed test.
If your Mobile or Desktop speed is poor, mostly Google will ask you to eliminate the render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.
Plagiarism
Google will penalize you if your content is similar to other people’s content. Therefore, it is important for you to ensure that your content is not being stolen or others do not have the same content as yours. One of the tools which I found very useful is Copyscape. It is an online plagiarism detection platform to help you look for content theft or similar content on the internet.
Copyscape is free to use only once a month, and you can sign-up for the Pro-version when you decide to use it for more times.
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
As more and more people using their mobile phone to access internet for information, Google would like to tap on this opportunity and make the user feel at ease. Google love to make the user happy and therefore if your site has slow loading speed, or not friendly to the mobile user Google will not want to show up on their search engine result page.
You can check whether your website is mobile friendly by putting your URL at Google’s Mobile Friendliness Tool.
Social Media Marketing
With the arrival of Facebook, more social media platforms are being introduced each year. We now have many others to use, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, WhatsApp,YouTube, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.
Each has its own loyal users and fan group, with some of them having large followers. These are useful platforms which you can use reaching out to potential buyers of your products/services.
Don’t Use Stop Word
Recently I came across some articles, telling me not to use stop words in our Meta Title; Meta Keyword; Links; Header Tags. You may wonder what are “Stop Words”?
Here are some of the common stop words you may want to avoid using: And, A, The, In, On, Of, Be, I, Me. Does this strategy work? No harm do your A/B testing on your site and see the outcome.
Google SEO Starter Guide
Based on what stated in this guide, Google wants us to focus on the visitors first, instead of the search engine. By providing the visitor with good user experiences and give them what they want, your site will rank higher on Google Search.
Here are the 10 basic guides you may want to pay attention:
- Create Unique Page Titles – this helps visitors recognize if the page is relevant to their search.
- Use Description Meta Tag – this gives a summary of what the page is about. Google might use them as snippets for your pages.
- Provide Good Site Structure
- Implement Right URLs Structure
- Write Good Anchor Text
- Optimize your Images
- Use Heading Tags correctly
- Use robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- Use free Webmaster Tools
Conclusion
It is good to check your ranking result after all the improvement implemented on your site. I usually will google my post title and see whether my post appearing on SERP Page 1 or 2, if not I will review, research and make improvement.
To make money online, your post or page need to be on 1st page or at least 2nd page. Not many people will browse their search results after the first 2 pages. Therefore, if you are not able to rank your content on these 2 pages, you are unlikely to make money online because no one will ever see your content.
It is important that you learn how to check your ranking on Google, and find ways to rank higher on it.
You will notice that most of the successful Online Marketers have their content rank very well on the internet. When you google those contents relevant to their niche, you will find that their post/page is on page 1. That gives them the competitive advantage over others, because more people will read their content and click on their recommended products/services.