Essential SEO Ranking Factors To Keep An Eye On
There are numerous factors which can cause a huge impact on your website overall SEO rankings in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). SEO has multiple aspects, including On-Page SEO, Off-Page SE0, Local SEO, and Technical SEO. Technical SEO is the one aspect that needs more attention to make the site crawlers-friendly and error-free. A complete website audit can assist you in highlighting the major technical SEO errors.
The conversation centered around technical SEO has paved the way for SEO experts to zero in on the unfolding features, requirements, and demands of improving technical SEO score to increase the organic traffic. Technical SEO has different requirements which are constantly changing and becoming more complex. The search engines keep changing, and the dynamics of technical SEO are also changing which are getting more and more sophisticated each day.
There are many technical factors that can harm the overall technical health of your website, including crawlability, sitemap, robots.txt, URL structure, website speed, and structured data markup. When you try to optimize your existing website, there are a number of SEO factors you need to consider; however, the following are some of the most essential SEO ranking factors that should focus on.
Crawlability
Crawlability has assumed optimum significance in the top SEO ranking factors as it determines which pages or sections of the website can be indexed by the search engines. Technicallu, XML sitemap, page speed, and robots.txt play a critical role in crawalibility factors of a website:
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a text file that contains all the URLs of the website. It can be in two formats: HTML and XML. The crawlers get help from the sitemap in order to index the website. If the sitemap is created in a proper way, it expedites the process of getting the website indexed by the crawlers in real time.
An HTML sitemap can be helpful both for the crawlers and users. An XML sitemap file is basically a text file with the one URL per link helping the search engine crawlers to crawl the website. You can also come up with the separate XML files for different assets, including videos, images, articles, etc. The sitemap can be submitted in the search consoles.
Robots.txt
A webmaster creates a text file called robots.txt sending clear instructions to the search engine robots how to crawl pages on the website. Through a robots.txt file, a webmaster can also control the user agents (crawling software) by indicating what user agents can or cannot crawl the website or part of the website.
According to Moz: “The robots.txt file is part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP), a group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access and index content, and serve that content up to users. ” The robots.txt always help the search engine crawlers find the links of the websites as the search engines always crawl the websites to discover content and index the content for the users of a search engine. The robots.txt can be submitted to search engines through search consoles.
Page Speed
Page speed determines how fast a website page loads and is tantamount to the amount of time taken by a webpage to load for a user. A website page’s loading speed depends on several different factors, including a site’s server, page file size, and image compression. Google has been using page speed as a ranking factor since 2010. A slow-loading website can easily hurt your rankings in search results.
User Experience
User experience plays a critical role in website rankings nowadays. The users are accessing the content on different devices. User experience leaves a deep impression of your brands on your users’ minds. Your website helps you present your message besides establishing a unique connection between your brand and your clients.
Mobile Usability
Mobile usability has gained immense importance since Google has changed its indexibility/crawalibility to Mobile-first. Mobile devices come in different screen sizes so the content should be rendered on these devices within their viewport.
Responsive Design
Responsive design can also enhance the users’ experience as the users interact with the different website elements on different screen sizes. Responsive websites should respond to the browsing behaviour of users and technological environment based on screen size, platform, and orientation of the devices.
Content Optimization
Content optimization is a critical element in SEO and required great expertise to have the content optimized for the users as well as the crawlers. Keywords, long-tail keywords, and phrases related to the page content need to be well-researched and used properly while keeping in mind the keyword density factor. The other things encompassing on-page SEO elements include headings, title tag, meta description, and internal links. These keywords and phrases describe the topics your site is about.
Latent semantic indexing (LSI)
LSI (Latent semantic indexing) is an indexing method used to identify patterns and the relationships between the keywords, terms and concepts contained in the text. In SEO domain, LSI is the method that Google and other search engines are using to study and compare relationships between different terms and concepts of the webpages. These keywords, terms, long-tail keywords, and phrases can be used to improve SEO traffic while creating more visibility and higher rankings in search results.
Search Intent & SEO
Search intent plays a key role in determining what pages the search engine should retrieve from its database in the Search Engine Result Page (SERPs). SEO experts need to keep search intent in mind when they optimize the content following a particular theme, subject, and point-of-view. They should develop a deep understanding of what people are looking for when they type in search keywords in realtime.
Your Money or Your Life Content (YMYL)
Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a type of content directly impacting the reader’s happiness, health, safety, or financial stability. If this type of information is presented deceptively and inaccurately, Google can penalize your website rankings on the SERPs. Your content can affect people’s lives and livelihood.
Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness (EAT)
EAT is an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google has categorized content in two broader terms: EAT and YMYL.
Expertise: The writer of the content should have credentials of an expert on that subject to support the arguments.
Authoritativeness: Your reader should consider you an authority in the field you are associated with. People know you and your background and look to you as a leader in your industry. They accept you as a good source of information.
Trustworthiness: You should be a solid source of information and enjoy the status of trustworthiness in the eyes of your reader. Being a trustworthy expert and source means people can trust you to provide honest, true and accurate information.
