There are factors that influence website ranking in search engines. Considering these factors determines how a website is ranked in search engines.
Many people wonder how the major search engines rank websites to determine which websites are the best for keyword searches. This is particularly something that people who are just starting into online marketing find perplexing. The answer to how to improve the ranking of a website through search engine optimization (SEO) methods is not always definite, but there are several known factors that have been known to significantly influence the ranking of websites.
Among the most significant factors that increase search engine optimization and influence the ranking of websites in major search engines to include a website’s content, a website’s architecture and a website’s link popularity. Even as the search engine innovations continue to advance, these have remained key factors to search engine optimization and determination of the websites that are best suited for keyword searches.
The website’s content
The old saying, “Content is king” can never be overemphasized. A website’s content is no doubt the number one factor that determines a website’s ranking by search engines. In fact, search engines are constantly developing new technologies to reward quality content on the web. The higher the quality of content on a website, the higher the website will be ranked by search engines. In turn, the high ranking of a website is a definite mark of approval that a website is relevant for particular keyword searches.
Among the things in a website’s content that are considered by search engines when evaluating the relevance of websites for keyword searches include the headers and page titles in websites, formatted texts, and links in a website, URLs of websites and page content in websites. These things help search engines establish websites that deserve high ranking for keyword searches. Therefore, for a website to be ranked highly through search engine optimization, it is very important that it maintains a good balance of these aspects of the content because they affect the ranking of websites in varying proportions.
More on the website’s content
The correct balance of keywords on a website’s page should generally be between four to five percent within the content of a website. This helps increase the odds of a website being ranked highly for keyword searches. Added to this, if the keyword is included in the URL of a website, a website’s page title and a website’s header the website increases its chances for favorable ranking by search engines. Different from earlier technologies where search engines only looked at the tags that indicated the description of a web page, today the search engine technology used by major search engines goes beyond the mega tags to look more keenly at the website’s content appropriateness for keyword searches.
The originality of a website’s content is therefore paramount to establishing and maintaining a favorable ranking of a website for keyword searches. To farther improve the chances of a website’s ranking in search engine searches, bolding the keywords can sometimes help. This indicates that a website is properly maintained, which goes a long way into convincing search engines that a website is good for keyword searches.
Website’s videos and SERP rankings
One of the reasons videos are nowadays a privileged form of content is because they are very well when it comes to delivering large amounts of information in a short/concise manner. A picture is worth a thousand words, we all know that and following that logic, we can communicate about 1.8 million words in a minute-long video which is around 3 600 pages of text.
From the standpoint of SEO, this is a big deal. The longer your visitor’s “dwell time” or session is, the greater your chances at getting search engines like Google to see your video’s value and the trustworthiness of the webpage it’s hosted on – and, ultimately, give the page a higher rank.
In addition to providing Google with textual information about your video, it needs to have an attractive thumbnail too.
in a recent e-mail interview, Natalia Hudyakova Simonenko, a Digital Marketing expert and CEO of Movavi, said,
“With regard to the SERP click-through rate, the thumbnail is even more important, since we, as humans, are naturally drawn toward catchy and beautiful images.”
Website’s architecture
The architecture of a website should ensure that the content of the website is not just appropriate, but that the content is easy to read. This is the number one reason why the architecture of a website should be maintained properly to ensure search engine optimization to a website’s content. In other words, the website’s architecture should have well-formed codes that make it easy for search engines to read the content of a site. Failure of the codes being well coded can lead to search engines totally missing a website’s content, which means poor ranking by search engines.
Therefore, websites should forego the old content management systems and use the newer, more improved encoding systems that use URL rewriting technologies. The new content management technologies make a website’s content easily readable by major search engines. This makes the website more visible by search engines. Moreover, making a website easily readable by people with disabilities also improves the chances of a website being ranked highly in major search engines.
Website’s link popularity
Needless to say, the popularity of a website is a good indication of how relevant a website is for keyword searches. A website that has high traffic suggests that the website contains relevant information for particular keywords. Because of this, the popularity of a website is used by search engines as a criterion for determining the relevance of a website for keyword searches. Google and Yahoo are an example of two major search engines that particularly use this criterion to rank websites.
Many search engines also use inbound links of websites on other websites to determine the popularity of a website. When a reference or link to a website is made within another website, search engines consider this a “vote of confidence” for the referred website.
This becomes an indication that the referred link is relevant for a particular keyword search. As a result, many such inbound references to a website are used to some degree by search engines to determine the ranking of a website.
These factors are obviously not the only SEO factors that determine the ranking of a website, but they are certainly among the well-known factors that significantly influence the ranking of the website by major search engines. Therefore, by considering these factors people stand the best chance of considerably optimizing the ranking of their website.
Jacob M. is a copywriter, marketing blogger, and inbound marketing consultant.
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