Bytes is WorldWide Merchant's blog in which we keep our clients informed about tips, tricks, updates, and new features of the WWM content management system.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
How Google Ranks Your Pages
A look at a few of the factors that Google uses to rank your website (as of early 2014).
Using somewhere around 200 variables, Google’s search ranking algorithm is an incredibly complex, dynamic thing which keeps us SEO professionals on our toes!
No one knows exactly how the search algorithm works, because the people over at Google guard their recipe like a dragon guards treasure. Still, they’re nice enough to give us search marketers clues as to what Google looks for in a website.
Google’s most recent major update, codenamed “Hummingbird,” was announced at the end of 2013. Hummingbird set the SEOverse all a-twitter. Would keywords still be relevant? What role would social media play in the new rankings? How much more value would Google place on quality content?
In the end, the Hummingbird update came and went with little fuss. There was some shuffling of rankings in the SERP’s (search engine results pages). But ultimately the dropped listings were low-quality sites and, for most companies, it was business as usual with little more than a hiccup in rankings.
Google Ranking Factors
Google uses about 200 factors in ranking your webpages for any given keyword. These factors range from things you can control (your content, your hosting provider, your site’s optimization), to things you have limited control over (quality of linkbacks and traffic statistics), to things you have no control over whatsoever (a searcher’s physical location, their browser history, and the keywords a searcher enters in Google).
The level of importance that Google gives to each of these factors is unknown and varies over time and from site to site, depending a variety of other factors.
At the Server Level
Server reputation
Server response time
Site uptime
SSL Certificate (for ecommerce sites)
At the Site (Domain) Level
Domain
Age
History
Registration length
Privacy settings
Penalized Whois owner
Country TLD extension
Site trust level
Keyword in Domain
Keyword position
Keyword in subdomain
Exact match domain (except when site is low quality)
Sitemap (XML)
Presence of
Frequency of updates
Freshness of updates
Content
Frequency of changes
Scope & magnitude of changes
History of page updates
Site architecture
Existence and completeness of Contact Us page
Existence of Terms of Service and Privacy pages
Number of pages
Mobile optimization
Site usability
SEO efforts
Use of Google Analytics
Use of Google Webmaster Tools
DMOZ listing
Yahoo! Directory listing
Schema.org microformats
Business brand signals
Site has Facebook page and likes
Site has Twitter profile with followers
Legitimacy of social media accounts
Site has official LinkedIn company page
Employees are listed at LinkedIn
Site has employee profiles
Site has a blog
Number of RSS subscribers
Business has physical location with a Google+ Local listing
At the Page Level
Page load speed via HTML and via Chrome
Page age
Priority in sitemap.xml
Number of other keywords for which the page ranks well
Keyword Formatting
Use in meta title tag
Prominence in title tag
In meta description tag
Use of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords in title and description tags
(LSI keywords put your keyword into context. E.g. Sage the accounting software or sage the herb?)
In H1 tag, in H2, H3, etc., tags
Keyword Use in Content
Relative density
Keyword prominence
Keyword word order
LSI keywords
Natural language keywords – natural variations of your target keyword
Content
Content length (The average top 3 sites for any keyword contains between 2,400 and 2,500 words)
Content age
Frequency of updates
Content syndication (Do you use syndicated content on your site? Google would rather offer people the original source.)
