Top Ranking Signals to Take into Consideration
There are over 200 ingredients, or ranking signals, the Google’s algorithms are made of. These are the very components which define top positions in search results. Bad news is that humans do not have enough time and resources to take care of every tiny factor to tune the SEO campaigns ideally. Good news is that we do not need to take care of each factor. We just need to set priorities for which we need to consider only a few basic factors which have the power to drive other tiny factors in the right direction.
Backlinks
Backlinks continue to be the most important ranking signal when we talk about SEO. However, the days of spam link are long gone. Google first worked on discouraging the bad links and then it continued to make things looks organic and natural regarding the creation of backlinks.
The first thing to take care about here is the link score. A link score is basically made up of several individual scores such as pagerank, trust flow, and citation flow etc. Quality of link is another very important factor of this score. One thing worth remembering here is that we cannot afford to have bad quality links in our websites in 2017 and beyond.
Another factor related to backlinks is the power of anchor text. Anchor text basically tells Google what your page is about. Hence, the anchor text needs to be organic and capable to guide the users and search engines towards right information.
Content
Content was and is the king. And it is going to remain in the authoritative position in the future. Hence, the quality should be of good quality. But, what the quality of content really is? There are a few factors which define the quality of content.
- First thing is the keyword usage. Keywords and their variations are still very much important in today’s world of SEO. Keywords combined with Meta description are still very effective in bringing online traffic to the website.
- Length of the content has much to do with the quality. However, the specific length of the content is not recommended anywhere. But the satisfying amount is defined as the content which, in its length, tends to provide appropriate answer or solution about a specific topic.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is very important for making the website a good experience on general basis. This SEO type is relatively newer but it is pretty much adjacent to the on-site SEO. However, the main difference is that it only includes technical aspects which should be focused to improve performance of the website.
The first thing that we should focus while working on the technical aspect of the website is the website speed. We often term speed as the rival factor of user experience because it can possibly restrict a developer from adding multimedia content in the pages. However, there are several technologies and tools available that can make multimedia content to load quite efficiently when a page is opened. This is the reason that page speed is now rightly associated with the better user experience.
Another very important aspect of technical SEO is the website’s ability to respond when the screen size in shortened. In other words, the mobile friendliness is now very important factor to take into consideration. since we now have more mobile internet users than the users who use internet on computers, the websites need to be developed to serve the needs of both kinds of users.