Sites with plenty of HTML errors can signal sloppy coding and a low-quality site. Make sure your website doesn’t have any HTML errors in Google Webmaster Tools that may affect your rankings. While this will not boost your traffic or rankings too much, it’s best to follow SEO best practices. However, if your website is losing a lot of backlinks, this can have a negative effect on your rankings. If you are buying or selling dofollow backlinks, Google will consider you as participating in a link scheme, and they will penalize you for manipulating rankings.

Google also uses SEO Anomaly information from other sources on the web, such as links and articles. Back when search engines lacked a lot of the sophistication they have today, the term “10 blue links” was coined to describe the flat structure of the SERP. Any time a search was performed, Google would return a page with 10 organic results, each in the same format. In terms of ranking web pages, engagement metrics act like a fact-checker.

The Great Bing Optimization Advantage

No matter how optimized your webpage is, if your content is not valuable, then you can’t expect higher rankings. Some website owners may be tempted to optimize for every ranking factor when it comes to getting higher rankings. It dominates other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, with more than 8.5 billion searches each day. LowFruits can help you with this last point, which is critical for staying on top of your most important keywords. It has one of the best rank tracker tools and is super easy to use.

Long Tail Keyword Generator

• However, relying on low-quality or irrelevant backlinks can hurt your SEO ranking factors.
• SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring your website reaches the right audience.
• These are metrics Google uses to measure the health of your website.
• So if you have an older domain that includes your keyword – you are golden!

Refer to our dedicated tutorial on keyword research to explore keyword research techniques and strategies. With most web traffic now coming from mobile devices, mobile-friendliness is another aspect of page experience. Choosing the right image format (JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF) is essential for optimization. JPEGs are typically better for photographs due to their balance of quality and file size, while PNGs are suitable for images requiring transparency. Refer to our dedicated tutorial on link-building techniques to build quality links for your website. Anchor text, the clickable text in a hyperlink, should vary naturally to reflect how people genuinely link to your content.

Mobile friendliness

Below, we’ve categorized these into major areas and provided brief descriptions for each factor that affects search engine rankings. High-quality links from reputable sources can significantly boost your site’s authority and rankings. Google ranking factors are metrics used in algorithms to evaluate and rank pages in search results.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners, webmasters, and SEO professionals understand how their site is performing in Google Search. For beginners looking to harness the power of SEO, mastering Google Search Console is a crucial step. Since voice searches are more detailed, long-tail keywords become incredibly important. These are longer and more specific phrases that visitors are likely to use. Incorporating long-tail keywords helps you target specific queries and increases your chances of appearing in voice search results. Voice searches are typically more conversational and longer than text searches.

So before we get into the actual SEO ranking factors, let’s start by answering some basic questions most people have about SEO. We’ve created this handy table of contents if you want to skip ahead to the SEO ranking factors. So it’s not so much that suddenly your page ranks higher because you have those keywords there. But suddenly it’s more well Google understands my content a little bit better and therefore it can send users who are explicitly looking for my content a little bit more towards my page. Mueller begins his answer by rebutting the rote and outdated SEO practice of mechanically adding keywords to the headings in the belief that heading tags are still a ranking factor.