What Are The Most Important Factors For Search Engine Rankings?
Hyper-Loop digital marketing one of the leading websites in the SEO industry conducts a study on the leading ranking factors every two years. The most recent study included over a hundred and fifty SEO experts and provided some of the best opinions and thoughts on over 90 ranking factors. The study also partnered up with several data companies to provide the most accurate information on the correlation between ranking factors and search engine results. On a 10 points scale here are the key factors they found ranking on search engines.
Domain-Level Link Features
This is essentially the quality and quantity of links that leads back to your website. If more websites link back to you then the search engine sees that as authoritative and will rank your site hire. But it goes beyond having numerous back links. It is important to have links that are not only trustworthy but they should be relevant to the content on your site. There are also tools that show the authority and trust of a web page. For example when the Hyper-Loop dashboard is displayed we can see the domain authority to the right of the web page listed. There are many programs that come up with their own rank for a pages authority. But they share many of the same factors in determining the score of a site.
Page-Level Link Features
This is basically the same at the domain level link features except it refers to the links aimed at a certain page of your website. Well it is not as important as the domain level links it still proves to be one of the leading factors in high rankings on search engines.
Page-Level Keyword & Content Based Features
This includes on page optimization of keyword usage. Algorithmic scores on content and how unique and relevant the content is. Therefore this includes keyword placement on elements such as the title, headlines, images and paragraph body.
Page-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features
These features are associated with the length of content, readability, speed, uniqueness, security and the structure of data mark up.
Engagement & Traffic/Query Data
This includes factors such as bounce rate, time spent on the site, page views per user and other elements of how a user engages with the website.
Domain-Level Brand Metrics
This is the branding on your website. This can include but is not limited to press releases, news media mentions in social media engagement is your brand being talked about on the web.
Domain-Level Keyword Usage
This is simply whether your domain name has an exact match to keywords that you are trying to rank for. When selecting a domain name and creating sub pages it is important to create the page domains with considerations to your primary keywords.
Domain-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features
This covers a wide array of metrics and data including domain name length, crawl errors, SSL certificate and the uniqueness of content.
Page-Level Social Metrics
This includes the interactions and engagement across social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and many more. Is your brand listed on the most relevant social media sites? Do you keep consistent content and have users engaged with your brand?
Conclusion
It is important to note that this list of ranking factors does not necessarily reflect proof on what search engines used to rank websites. Search engines Such as Google do not reveal the exact correlation between specific ranking factors and organic results. If they did people would take advantage of the system and it would eliminate the value behind ranking factors. A good example of this is keyword stuffing. Some years ago Meta Description tags were an important ranking factor for SEO. Once this became known to the public, many SEO practitioners took advantage of that by stuffing specific keywords into the descriptions. This gave certain sites an unfair advantage and once Google saw the issue get out of hand. They eliminated the SEO value of the Meta Description.
