5 SEO Factors You Need to Know to Rank Higher in Search Engines

Learn about 5 SEO factors you need to know if you want your website or blog post rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Understand how technical SEO; metadata optimization; keyword placement; freshness & relevance affect your rankings.

5 SEO Factors You Need to Know to Rank Higher in Search Engines

But simply having content isn't enough to help your site rank based on the keyword terms it's targeting. According to a study by Ahrefs, 91% of online content generates no traffic from Google. So, what do we know about search engines' value in creating content? It can be argued that the relevance of content to user intent is its most important ranking factor since if your content is not relevant to a search, it will be devalued. Deep or extensive content addresses as many user concerns as possible while providing new perspectives.

Even search engines seem to prefer long-form content for many informational user searches. A HubSpot study found that content between 2,250 and 2,500 words tended to receive the most organic traffic. This seems to be the sweet spot for SEO, although creating pages of much more than 2500 words, when necessary, can also be beneficial. Despite the rise of semantic analysis, SEO tags play an important role in content creation. Ultimately, we design websites for both people and search engines.

When we design for users, it's always good to see your website and its content from a new perspective. It has long been suspected that user participation, or user signals, are a ranking factor for Google, even indirectly. Next, we must consider how our technical structure affects user engagement and keyword ranking. Technical SEO could be viewed as the basis of SEO, where everything else is based. Without a solid technical foundation, your content warehouse will collapse.

This makes the interconnection practice extremely important, which we'll discuss later. For now, we'll just be concerned with making sure that our website is crawlable and that our crawl budget is optimized. The number one technical error we found on customer sites is linking to mixed content or HTTP pages. This can happen during an SSL migration and is due to several causes. While, in theory, pages should be redirected to their HTTPS equivalent, having links to mixed content is not advantageous.

Most importantly, these links don't always redirect. As necessary, you don't want content that links to broken or redirected pages. Not only can this affect speed, but it can also affect indexing and crawl budgets. Usually, you need clean URL structures with 200 status codes. However, as websites age and companies change, it can be not easy to maintain consistency across the site and a strong interconnection structure. Creating an interconnecting structure organized around similar themes allows the lower pages of the site to draw some authority from the higher-authority pages.

Tags are even implemented to help organize content and help readers understand the context of specific topics. H1 tags (short for header) are HTML tags for the more significant title of a document. It is placed in the body section of a web page and is a considerable title visible to the reader. Having your keyword in an H1 tag is considered necessary for SEO—most search engines index entire web pages from start to finish.

But this takes up a lot of memory and disk space, so some store and index only the beginning of the page. A keyword in a page's first 100 to 200 characters is necessary for ranking. It indicates that the word is essential for the content and ensures that the keyword is in the indexed part of the page. Now, you must work hard on your titles and descriptions.

It would be best to have a page title, a slightly different H1 title, and a meta description of a few lines. The keyword of the page should appear in each element naturally. It's usually easier to access the content on your site. This is where you'll place your H1 title and keywords in the content.

You may need to check that the H1 tags are placed around the pages' titles within the page code. The title tag appears below the URL but above the meta description in the search engine results. Title tags must be eye-catching, tailored to the brand, and optimized for keywords. In theory, metadata optimizations are the most basic tasks.

However, creating title tags and meta descriptions in practice is more of a nuanced art than a pure science. Like title tags, H1 must be ingenious, engaging, and full of keywords to attract the target audience to the content principle. That said, H2 and H3 are often where the real opportunity lies, as they are more likely to be neglected, obsolete, and not optimized, making them perfect targets for SEO optimization.

How Many Ranking Factors Does Google Have?

There are about 200 known classification factors.

It would be best to consider These main ranking factors in Google Search to rank at the top of the SERPs. There is no clear general rule about the optimal word count for an article, as it varies by topic; however, we note that longer and fuller content tends to rank higher. A study conducted by Neil Patel reveals a correlation between the length of the content and the top positions in Google searches. Another important Google ranking signal is RankBrain, which aims to provide the most relevant and valuable results by better understanding the user's intention behind a search query.

RankBrain uses machine learning to understand complex searches and their relationship to specific topics while considering how the user behaves concerning the exact set of search results. Therefore, search results that are more successful among users are rewarded with higher rankings.

Read More About RankBrain

In our article dedicated to understanding Google Rankbrain, you can read more about this algorithm's objectives and how it works with other ranking factors such as freshness or relevance. The first result is usually up-to-date; meanwhile, 3 out of 6 results include dates when Google published them; this updated algorithm seems faster than other basic algorithms Google updates. We've seen that it only takes a few days for customers' old sites' updates to impact SERP rankings; this shows how important it is for website owners to keep their sites up-to-date with fresh content. In conclusion, SEO requires hard work; if done correctly, it can bring great rewards, such as higher rankings, more organic traffic, better user experience, increased brand awareness, etc.

Conclusion

SEO requires hard work, but if done correctly, it can bring great rewards such as higher rankings, more organic traffic, better user experience, increased brand awareness, etc.

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