Search Rank

Industry professionals have long argued about how search engines rank webpages. Google has kept their exact algorithm a trade secret. They have now announced the top three factors that they consider when ranking web pages. Therefore, business people who want their webpages to rank higher need to concentrate on RankBrain, content and in-bound links.

RankBrain

People perform over 3 billion searches on Google every day. The way that people word these searches are sometimes totally unique. Therefore, Google uses artificial intelligence that they have named RankBrain to determine exactly the information that the user is hoping to find. According to Gary Isles of Google, content that is written naturally does very well in RankBrain.

There are over 200 different factors that RankBrain puts together to determine the search rank, according to Search Engine Journal, a well-respected trade industry publication.
Some search ranking factors include:

• Domain factors such as age and keyword ranking
• Page-level factors such as title tags, description tags and content length
• Site-level factors including unique valuable content, organized sitemaps and the use of YouTube videos
• Banklink factors including the authority of linking domains, links from competitors and backlink anchor text
• User interactions including time spent on page and repeat traffic
• Brand Signals including top-level domains and the authority of the company
• On-Site SEO including avoiding links from bad neighborhoods and absence of popup ads
• Off-page SEO including avoiding web spam and not including links from unrelated sites

Use Links Effectively

Google has said that one of the top three ranking factors is the use of incoming links. It is very important that you create well-rounded content that delivers what it promises. Therefore, people will want to link to that article when they are writing their own content. The more pages that link to a page on your site, the higher its search ranking. This is especially true if the incoming link comes from a .edu or .gov domains. There is also evidence to suggest that links to your article from Wikipedia hold great weight. When the incoming links to your pages are graded by Google, pages that have more shares are ranked higher.

Google has said on numerous occasions that they do not consider social media when ranking sites. Therefore, these links are worthless for ranking. Before you throw your whole social media platform in the trash, remember that while they may not actually look to see if a post is shared or how many people have liked a page, there is great evidence to show that articles that receive shares straight from the webpage are ranked higher. Therefore, you should be creating content that people want to share with their friends. Furthermore, you should make it easy for people to share straight from the page by including share buttons to all the prominent social media sites.

Creating Great Content

Google also says that content is one of the top three factors when they decide how to rank sites. Content should be unique. An easy way to do this is to let your personality show through in each article that you write. Do not use the same words in more than one location on the web. The best content also is the most useful content. Show a viewer that they have a problem and how the product that you are selling will help them solve their problem. The more specific that you are, the better Google will like your content. Therefore, when possible, include statistics and other forms of data. Finally, your content needs to create a sense of urgency with the reader.

If you would like to discuss the specifics of getting your website to rank higher, then Lucid Advertising would love to talk to you.