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.
