March 2017 - Syntax Definition

List of Google Ranking Factors

Get Useful Content This is the most important signal for Google Ranking Factors. Directly or indirectly, your visitors are your customers. Impress them, help them, and give them what they’re looking for. That’s the whole point!

Tip: Write well edited comprehensive articles that provide value to the readers. Pay attention to detail & avoid spelling mistakes. Be original with your content, research, and analysis. Add trusted sources to support the information you give. Write interesting articles targeted for readers, not for search engines. Write what is beyond obvious.

Your landing page should bring an end to users search for that term. who likes to waste time searching endlessly for something. keep that in mind.

Domain age

A brand new website which has no old WHOIS history is hard to rank in search engine for the first three months. For high volume keywords, it can take six months or more.You need to be around for at least 2-3 months for this to be considered as Google ranking factors. You shouldn’t dream to be on the first page in the first couple of months unless you create a website with extraordinary content.

Organic quality links pointing to your website (Dofollow)

When others find your web page useful or interesting, they link back to you. If the link is nofollow, it is not counted by Google to calculate your PageRank. Dofollow links improves your website authority. Links are supposed to come organically and there are webmaster guidelines which warn you against any kind of unethical methods.

Tip: Buying links will be injurious to your website. Google may penalize your site, and if there is a manual action taken on it, it will disappear from the search results altogether. You may have to visit the doctor. Google is also very strict on violations. So don’t be a villain.

Duplicate content

The only way a site will rank well is if it has unique quality content. If you scrape other sites to create your web pages, they are not going to rank in search engine. There are webmaster guidelines on duplicate content. A good habit is to check your pages on Copyscape after publishing them to make sure you have not added any duplicate content unintentionally. Pages with content that provides real unique value, rank well.

Mobile friendly site

With more than 56% of all traffic being from mobile devices. They confirmed mobile friendly website as a Google Ranking Factors, your web pages need to display well on mobile devices like smartphones & tablets.

Secure website (HTTPS)

On 06 August 2014, Google confirmed HTTPSecure as a ranking signal. HTTPS protects the privacy and security of visitors and the integrity of the website. It not only prevents the users from intruders but also from Wi-Fi providers and ISP from injecting ads into your web pages. You can easily get a free SSL certificate from providers like Let’s Encrypt and then setup them on your hosting server or you can sign up with a host like SiteGround which provides them for free.

Site Speed

In April 2010, Google confirmed website Speed as a Google ranking factors. Your website load time should be less than 3 seconds, ideally in less than 2 seconds. If a site takes long to load, users are most likely to abandon it.

This website has a PageSpeed score 84/100 on desktops respectively. To check load times for a webpage, you can use pingdom.com.

Domain history

If you are buying a domain that has been owned previously, you might want to make sure it hasn’t been in trouble with Google in the past. If it has received a manual action in the past, then it would be hard for it to acquire a respectable rank. You may either do a site:domain.com search or check archive.org to make sure it was not spammy.

Keyword density

Webmaster Guidelines mentions that keyword stuffing can harm your ranking in long run. You should make sure that the keyword density is not too much & it doesn’t appear to Google that you are keyword stuffing even if that is not your intention. As per my views, as long as it’s not above 4%, you should be able to achieve a decent rank. There is no ideal keyword density; your content & its quality matters more.

Keyword in H1, title tag, meta description, first paragraph & URL

By using your keyword once in each of the important places like the URL, H1 heading tag, web page title tag, meta description and in the first paragraph, you are telling the search engines and users about what your content is focused on. Without them in the right places, it is generally difficult to gain rank and get clicks. You should make sure that you don’t end up stuffing keywords. These should be unique & descriptive. This is important for Google Ranking Factors.

Drupal General concepts

we will discusses some general concepts that will be useful for you to begin explore Drupal.

Node (Content)

A node is the general term for a bit of content on your website. The content type of the node will define what fields are included with it. Based on the type of node, different fields will be attached, and this is known as a content type. For eg: a basic Page content type has included fields such as title and body fields. Other examples of content type are: Book pages for use in Books, Blog pages in blogs, Discussion topics in forums, and News articles.

The word “node” is not used in mathematical sense as part of a network.

Entity types

An entity type is a useful abstraction to group together fields. Entity types stores and display data, which can be nodes (content), comments, user profiles, taxonomy terms or something custom developed.

Comment

They are another type of content you can have on your site (if you have activated the core Comment module). Each comment is typically a type of content that a user submits, attached to a distinct node. For example, each piece of discussion bound to a particular forum topic node is a comment.

Taxonomy

Drupal has a system for classifying content referred as taxonomy. This is provided by the core Taxonomy module. user can define their own vocabularies (groups of taxonomy terms) and add terms to each vocabulary. Each vocabulary can then be linked to one or more content types, and in this way, nodes on your site can be grouped into various categories, classified, or tagged in any way you choose.

User

A user is a entity which represents a actual-world website user. By default, a user has a set of properties like their user name, password, e-mail address, and role. However, they may also have other properties provided by other modules, and it can be extended with new fields. For example, you could add a new field “Link” for user’s Twitter address.

Module

A module is a part of software (code) that extends Drupal functionality. Modules fall into one of three categories:

Core modules are by default included with the main download of Drupal. These can be turned on or off without downloading additional components. Examples include Taxonomy, Book, Poll, or Blog
Contributed modules can be downloaded from the download section of drupal.org, and installed inside your Drupal installation. Examples include Panels, Views or Meta tag.
Modules which you write yourself is called Custom Module. This requires a through understanding of Drupal, PHP programming, and Drupal’s API.

Regions & Blocks

Pages on your Drupal site are laid out in Regions. These can include the header, footer, featured top, featured bottom, sidebars, main content regions etc.. . Your theme may define additional regions.

Blocks are discrete chunks of information that are displayed in the regions of your website’s pages. Blocks can take the form of static chunks of HTML or text, menus (which are for site navigation), the output from modules or dynamic listings that you’ve created yourself (e.g. a list of new users).

Menus

There are four standard menus in Drupal 7:

The Main menu is built by site administrators and displayed automatically in the page header section of many themes (if not, you can enable their blocks to display them).
Management is the administration menu, and is presented in the Admin toolbar.
Navigation is a link-all menu that usually contains links supplied by modules on your website.
User menu contains links to the User account and the logout link.
You can also create your own menus (custom), and display them by enabling their blocks.

You can customize menus in several ways, such as reordering menu items by setting their “weight” or simply dragging them into place, renaming menu items, and changing the link title (i.e, tooltip that appears when you mouse hover a menu item). You can move a menu item into a different menu by editing the Parent property of the menu item.

You can also include custom menu items to a menu, from the Add menu item tab of the Menu administration screen. To create a menu item, you will need to provide the path/url to the content.

In all cases a menu item will only be displayed to a visitor if they have the permission to view the page it links to. For example, the admin menu item is not shown to visitors who are not registered/logged in.

Theme

The Theme layer is separate from the data layer, the functionality extension layer (module) and Core. Theme controls the appearance (look and feel) of your site, or how your site is displayed, including the graphic look, layout, and colors. A theme consists of one or more PHP template files that define the HTML output of your site’s pages, along with one or more CSS files that define the layout, fonts, colors, and other styles.

For a collection of useful materials for themers, see Theming and Front End Development with Drupal.

Views

Not all sites have Views, most sites include the Views module because of the excellent tools it provides. Views allows people to choose a list of nodes or other entities and present them as blocks, pages, RSS feeds, or in other formats. The main use case for views is to create dynamically updating lists of content (for example, a list of news), based on characteristics of that content (in the case of the news listing, that the content type is “News” and sorted by publication date).

Database

Drupal preserve information in a database. Inside this database, each type of information has its own database table. For example, the basic information about the nodes of your website are stored in the Node table, and data of each field stores in a separate table (which Drupal creates automatically). Comments and Users also have their own database tables, as permissions, roles, and other settings.

The most common database for Drupal is MySQL. However, you can also run Drupal on other database systems, such as PostgreSQL, as well.

Path

When you visit a URL under your Drupal site, the part of the URL after your base site address is known as the path.

When you visit a path in your Drupal site, Drupal figures out what information should be sent to your browser by checking its list of routes and menu items. Generally, Drupal allows each module to define paths that the module will be responsible for, and when you choose to visit a particular path Drupal checks the module what should be displayed on the page.

For example, the page you are now viewing is http://drupal.org/node/18728, and the path is “node/18728”. The module that is functional for this path is the core Node module, so when you visit this page, Drupal lets the Node module determine what to display.

Bootstrap

The bootstrap is the CPU (central processing unit) of Drupal. this is sometimes called the event loop in other interactive software environments . Drupal’s core is a bit like that. It sits around waiting for a path request, and then starts processing the request.

Permissions

Permissions can be set to control what users have access to view and/or edit particular areas of a site. These permissions relates to registered users (ie: content editors, administrators, site members) and non-registered users. Permissions can be set to be very specific and granule making for a powerful feature to use when developing a site’s structure.