14 Secrets About Website Ranking

In the world of website ranking you will come across a lot of people who make use of different tactics and different approaches. However, the following 14 items are really important secrets that you need to know so that you can spot the frauds.

A search engine will find your site. They have special algorithms and programs that crawl the internet and find websites. The only thing that submitting your site to a search engine does is encourage this process to speed up. If you are going to submit your site to search engines, submit a sitemap to Google and leave it at that. The rest will follow on its own. Submitting your site to hundreds of search engines does absolutely nothing for your traffic or your website ranking on its own.

Google really and truly does not care about the average website owner. They care about their users and getting as much money from the website owners as possible. This being said, if there is one thing that Google is good at it is sticking to their guns when it comes to their website ranking factors. Once a factor has been added to the ranking algorithm the odds are good that it is there to stay. The top two factors that Google looks at are your link profile and your site content. If you make sure that those two are exactly in line with Google’s evergreen guidelines your site will rank – no matter how many updates Google's algorithm goes through.

Links, links, links…

One of the first things that an SEO consultant worth their salt looks at is your backlink profile. Followed closely by your website content intra-linking and interlinking. Any consultant that says you need to build links using some kind of tool is going to get you into trouble. A consultant that wants to get your website links by content marketing is on the right track.

The thing is this: you do not want to have hundreds of links from any and every site on the internet. You want your backlinks to be relevant and high quality. You want the links to come from established leaders in your niche.

A website ranking strategy that does not include working on your own website's outlinking and intra-linking profile is not going to help you too much. It is important that you link out at least a little and that you point Google in the right direction on your own site with intra-linking.

Do not let your web developer cop out by building two different website – one for mobile and one for desktop. Make sure that your website is mobile friendly from the get go and that desktop comes after mobile in priority. Your designs and code should take mobile into consideration first because it is far more complicated to display content effectively and in the right hierarchy on a small screen than a large screen. It is also faster for a desktop to render conditional CSS than it is for a mobile device to do it. Google knows this and will rank websites that cater to mobile as a priority over those that are not mobile friendly at all or are less mobile friendly.

Yes – SSL is a thing and don’t let anyone tell you any different. Chrome, the web browser built by Google, will warn you if you are about to go to a website that does not have SSL or has an expired or invalid certificate. Google's algorithm takes your SSL status into account when doing its website ranking. If you are with the right hosting provider you should be able to get SSL for free or at least included in your hosting package. Make sure you do, the negative impact no SSL could have on your website ranking is real.

People's attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. The current view is that if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load you've lost your audience already. Google will take a look at this and will rank faster sites over slower sites. Make sure you are not serving up a slow, heavy website.

Keyword selection in an SEO campaign is a very important step. You need to have a selection of long tail and high demand keywords in your campaign. Those long tail keywords are definitely worth their weight in gold though. A high demand keyword is going to take more time and effort to rank for than a long tail keyword. A long tail keyword is far more specific than the high demand keyword. True, the demand for the long tail is lower but the traffic that you get is going to be far more targeted and more likely to convert because they know exactly what they are looking for.

Negative SEO is not a myth. When your less than scrupulous competition notices you are outranking them, they are going to get miffed. They will either work harder on their own SEO or they will attack your website ranking. If you notice that your rankings are behaving oddly or that your backlink profile has suddenly exploded – it is time to call foul. The odds are you will not know who is behind it which really is not fair, but you can at least start to do something about it. Start disavowing and attempting to remove those links as quickly as you can. Hopefully you will be able to get your site fixed and figure out who is behind it.

Make sure you fill in those meta tags and make them unique. Not only are they a major ranking factor, they are the first impression for any potential visitor to your site. Having a great website ranking is useless if your meta tags are bland and don’t attract attention and clicks.

Think hook, line and sinker – title, description and content. Each page should have high quality meta tags that are descriptive and enticing and content that is relevant to the search you are targeting.

Content is one of the biggest ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. To ignore your content is really, really stupid. If your SEO company wants to fiddle your content to include the targeted keywords – let them. Your content must include your targeted keywords and variations on those keywords. Keep adding to your content and keep updating your site. The more content you have, the more relevant you must be and the more of an authority you can become.

The longer each piece of content is, the better.

Of course, duplicate content is a big no, no. Keep it original and keep it to yourself. If you want to share your content to get more exposure, make sure you get that canonical link from the other copies of your content.

Google's algorithm contains a number of domain specific factors. They range from age and WHOIS visibility to the actual words contained in the domain name. An older domain with a stable WHOIS record will do better than one which has just been registered or has changed hands a lot. A domain with your product in the URL will do better (slightly) than one that is not related to your services at all. Branded domains are also better than something totally unrelated.

Update that content. Add more content, switch it up, change your product descriptions, change images… Keeping things fresh and interesting is an indication to Google that your website is up to date and staying relevant and on topic.

Keep that keyword coming. It should appear high up on the page. Put it in the title if you can, add it to your header tags, put it in your image alt tags, exact match and variations are important. The more instances of a keyword in the content the more relevant that content must be. Of course, you can go too far. Make sure that the content still reads well and is not stuffed so full of keywords that it sounds like a stuck record.

Have you heard of Google Analytics? Google keeps track of your visitors’ behaviour. A website that does not keep its visitors interested will have a high bounce rate and will have a low average time per visit (or session). These are indicators to Google that the site is not all it appears to be and does not deserve to be placed high in the rankings.

If you want to know more about the website rankings factors used by Google, Backlinko has a great article on that very topic: https://backlinko.com/google-r...