Have you ever wondered on how search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! rank the results in the way they do? There are thousands of factors that go into account for how this is actually done. With so many factors, how can you manage all of that? We accomplish that by focusing on the major factors that impact rankings the most. There are five factors that affect rankings the most. These factors are content, branding, keyword focus, links, and website health.
KEYWORD FOCUS
Having a keyword focus is very important. A keyword is a word that describes a product or service that you make or do. For example, the word “Chess boards” is a keyword. Each page on your web site needs to have it’s own individual keyword focus. This eliminates confusing from the search engines on what page to serve of your website. This also eliminates the chance of competing against yourself.
CONTENT
Content is now THE biggest factor that search engines use to rank websites and pages. Without the content on the web page, a search engine will not know what the page is about. Search engines are very smart yet very dumb so if we don’t tell them what is on the page, how can it get ranked? These means that we have to have great quality content on all of our pages.
There are a several different types of content out on the web. There is informational, products, advertising, and educational just to name a few. Each page on your website needs to focus on the type of content it needs to be. For example, if you are educating people about how the new motor in your car now get more horsepower because of specific upgrades, then we need to only have content about exactly that. If we are trying to sell the motor on our website too, then we can have another page giving the sales information and reminding them why they want this motor.
BRANDING
Branding is important to know how well you are doing to become a leader in your industry. We strive to become the people that other people come to for either product, information, pictures, or whatever your industry may be.
Increasing brand awareness is a challenge in itself. To increase it, you need to stand out from the rest AND let people know about it. It is great that you have a brand new product in the industry but if you don’t let people know that this new product is by you and where they can find you, you aren’t increasing brand awareness.
LINKING
Linking is the way to increasing your brand awareness. Links drive the search engines and bring this all together. Links are created in so many different ways and there are different types of links. The main link that drives rankings are high quality links. A high quality link is a link that is coming from a trusted place. Trusted places are government sites, college sites, and leading review websites like Consumer Reports or RateItAll. Other are bloggers that are trusted and valued in their opinions. Links can also be done through social media. Post about your business, events, or your content in an intriguing way to make people want to share it with others.
WEBSITE HEALTH
Your website also needs to be healthy. A healthy website doesn’t have broken links, poor quality content, and a misunderstanding on what the website is about. A healthy website also doesn’t have technical issues like long load times, server response time is slow, and not properly formatting your content. Webmasters and web designers can clean up these sort of technical issues. However, they aren’t responsible for the quality of the content that goes up on the website. That is the job of who is doing your SEO.
SUMMARY
To sum it up, SEO is a complicated, tedious, and very long process that takes time to plan, schedule, and execute. Skipping a step or not completing a task fully is what makes a good SEO plan not work.
