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By Abhyudaya Tripathi
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25 Jan, 2016
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~ 9 minutes to read
25 Jan, 2016
~ 9 minutes to read
Search engine optimization makes the websites search engine friendly. Promoting businesses on the global platform brings several opportunities along with challenges. A survey held by the reputed website Moz for the year 2015 reveals the future of search for the year 2016. The study unfolded the essential factors like mobile friendliness, design, mobile apps, and the influence of structure data in SERPs.
With the enhanced competition in every domain, it has become mandatory for organizations not to take the search engine optimization process casually. Famous search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing have various factors by which they provide rankings to the websites in their search results. As we all know, from time to time, Google updates its algorithms and factors for website rankings, which are followed by SEO professionals across the world. With this blog, I would like to highlight the top fifteen most important Google ranking factors for the year 2016.
For getting assured high rankings in search engine results, backlinks will continue to be the most important factor. It is recommended that you should never buy links from sites or link farms because there may be the possibility of getting spammy backlinks that could damage your online reputation. However, it depends on the domain authority of the site from where you are getting backlinks. (see the below chart from LinkedIn which shows how many links to get from a specific website according to its quality levels).
Quality backlinks can yield wonderful results for your websites but for it, you need relevant links only. I especially recommend Ahrefs.com as the best site to analyze the backlinks and keyword phrases. Thus, you need to target only those websites that are somehow related to your domain of specialization. It is advised to check domain authority (DA) & ratings, URL ratings, and Alexa rank.
Several factors regarding the domain, like age, keywords, registration length, history, etc., matter when it comes to getting high rankings in Google. Google considers these factors as the crucial parameters to provide better SEO rankings to your website in search results pages. Obtaining links from quality sites is an excellent practice that can boost your rankings to achieve higher SEO success. If you succeeded in taking your website domain authority (DA) in between 50-60, then it means you are on the right track, and it is time to celebrate for it.
The content of your website has a significant role to play when it comes to ranking well in SERPs. A site must contain quality content that reflects relevancy, accuracy, reliability, and authenticity. Websites’ content must include the right set of keywords with perfect keyword density to support SEO campaigns. To get high results, you have to pay attention to keyword factors. For instance, the inclusion of primary keywords in H1 and H2 tags can yield exceptional outcomes and positively affect your website to secure high rankings.
Keyword’ density is another important factor considered by Google. Keyword density depicts the number of times you have used your keyword in a piece of content. Thus, putting your targeted keywords in blogs or articles with the appropriate density can provide high rankings in search engine result pages. Besides this, updating website content, blogs, and articles are some great practices with which you can positively affect your rankings. Writing on trending topics will add extra value to you valuable efforts as information seekers always look for fresh and latest content.
In recent times, user interaction (UI) and user experience (UX) have become one of the most important factors that are considered important in getting top rankings in search results of Google. The UI and UX refer to mobile-friendliness, proper text placement, image placement, relevant content, font size, navigation, and links. Both of them are treated as technical factors that include the process of web designing and development. Proper measures should be taken to create a search engine-friendly website. Designers and developers need to work on essential factors like website speed and mobile optimization.
It is usually observed that most of the users are easily diverted to other sites if the website takes more time to load than they visited. Overall, the UI and UX stand for better web design and have the power to attract more clients, which boosts and brings traffic to the site.
An important ranking factor in 2016 is Sitemaps. Google loves the contribution of new pages and content into its database. Thus, creating a sitemap for the website has proven beneficial to get visibility in the search engine like Google. The sitemap enables you to inform Google immediately in case of even minor changes.
Regarding search engine optimization, responsive web design can positively influence your rankings in SERPs as it allows managing a single site with just a unique set of hypertext links. It minimizes the additional time and effort in maintaining your site. With the passage of time, a massive crowd of online audiences has shifted towards smartphones, thus, responsive design enables and empowers you to target even more audience for the interest of your business.
We all are familiar with the power of social media platforms. Business promotion on social media platforms heavily depends on the number of shares that occur because it affects and enhances the chances of getting higher rankings. Thus, it is advised to create social media profiles and to post frequent information from time to time for better engagement.
If you provide informative content to your online audience that is proving helpful for them, then it is quite obvious to get positive feedback. Getting positive feedback from visitors and customers enhances your site’s authenticity. As a result, you will be rewarded with increased ranking in search engine result pages. The positive feedback will positively influence the search engine optimization success 2016.
The use of pictures and videos is trending worldwide to make websites more attentive. Online audiences get easily engaged with these graphics and videos, which drive tremendous traffic to your site. Thus, putting some appealing graphics and videos can help you a lot to get assured visibility in search engines.
Among several search engine optimization tactics, one is local SEO service, which means targeting the local area in which you have set up your business. Thus, this factor will also be considered in the Google ranking factor. Local listing is a good way to start when it comes to getting high rankings in the search results. Here are few stats that help you understand the importance of local search:
Meta tags are one of the most important factors in the Google Page Rank. These tags are the most effective way to provide information about your website to search engines. Further, these tags are used to provide information to users to make them aware of the type of content they are going to encounter in SERP. If you use Meta tags on your site, then search engines read them to get a summarized idea about your website along with your keywords.
Internal site linking refers to the linking of the pages of a domain to the other pages of the same domain. This technique is primarily used to make the navigation process easier to guide a visitor to the required destination. Internal site linking is considered one of the best search engine optimization practices with which you can boost your online ranking in search engines.
Read: Internal Linking SEO Best Practices
The server location is another technique used by SEO professionals to boost the rankings. For instance, if you want to target the US market, then you have to make sure that your server is hosted in the US. By doing so, you would notice a positive change in your rankings in SERPs.
Google has already announced that adding an SSL certificate to your website will give you a valuable boost in rankings. The primary reason for using an SSL certificate is to encrypt and protect the information sent across the Internet. Including an SSL certificate contributes to making your website highly trusted and protected.
You have to be sure about the design and development codes of your website, and whether they match with the W3 consortium standards. Even in the case of modifications, you need to check whether the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML codes used in your website are valid.
SEO is a dynamic process, and the points described above come from my experiences and case studies. Maybe you know only some of these, or maybe you know all of them. Thus, I always suggest you search for new things because nothing is more powerful than your own research, and I hope the above-mentioned points will prove beneficial for you. If you have something to suggest or ask, then you are most welcome, you can comment below.
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