If, as you should, you have a website showcasing your music et al, your number one priority should be increasing your site’s ranking in Google search results. While there are roughly 200 factors involved in the Google search algorithm, we here look at fifteen of the most important.
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Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0
If you have a website (I hope you do) displaying your musical wares, you want it to rank high in a Google search. But page ranking requires site optimization in order to get the utmost attention from all search engines. Since Google is the big dog in search by far, if you get the SEO (search engine optimization) there then the others will pretty much follow.
The Google search algorithm is rumored to have more than 200 page ranking factors involved. Here are some of the most important that come from Google itself as collected by link-assistant.com.
1. Keyword in the page URL. Using a target keyword as a part of the page’s URL can act as a relevancy ranking signal, but the ranking impact is rather small.
2. Country code top level domain (ccTLD). A country-code top-level domain is a domain with an extension pointing at the website’s relation to a certain country (for example, .it for Italy or .fr for France, .ca for Canada, etc.). This helps you rank better in the target region.
3. Country code top level domain (TLD). A country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) is a domain with an extension pointing at the website’s relation to a certain country (for example, .it for Italy or .fr for France, .ca for Canada, etc.). It is believed that having a ccTLD helps you rank better in the target region.
4. Keyword in the title tag. The title tag tells search engines about the topic of a particular page, which they then use it form a text snippet in a search. This appears to be less important than it used to be, according to a recent correlation study.
5. Image optimization. Alt text, the file name, title, and description are important ranking factors, especially for image search.
6. Content comprehensiveness. How fully a page’s content covers a topic, which is believed to indicate content quality and therefore make the site more trustworthy.
7. Internal linking. These are links to other pages of the site, which tells a search engine which pages are the most important.
8. User friendly layout. Google has launched a Page Layout algorithm that penalizes sites with distracting ads and annoying pop ups.
9. Page category. A page that appears in a relevant category (which all sites don’t have) might get some ranking boost.
10. Site structure. Poor website architecture prevents search engine bots from crawling all the necessary pages of your website, which may hamper the visibility of the website in search results.
11. HTTPS. Sites that use HTTPS are ranked higher because they protect visitors more.
12. Page speed. Page speed is considered to be one of the most significant ranking factors, especially for mobile sites.
13. Mobile usability. With so much consumption done on mobile devices these days, mobile usability has become one of the principal factors for a website ranking.
14. Number of direct links. The number of domains and pages that link to a website.
15. Links from relevant sources. Backlinks from the sources relevant to the referred page are considered to be strong ranking signals.
As stated above, the Google search algorithm takes into account more than 200 factors when ranking a webpage. These 15 are considered to be some of the most reliable when optimizing your site for a search.