Unchanging Fundamentals: 10 Powerful SEO Ranking Factors 2024
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Basically. It is the best way to increase your sales or leads organically.
SEO is essential for any online business to reach organic traffic for potential customers and rank higher on search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
SEO is a dynamic work, and it keeps changing over time. So, it is quite a challenge. Another important effect over SEO is core updates of Search engines. But there are 10 important factors that never changed over time and seem it will not change too.
But there are 10 key factors which never changes and affect SEO. If you optimize them well, you will rank better and faster in search engines.
- A Secure and Accessible Website
- Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)
- Mobile Friendliness
- Domain Age, URL, and Authority
- Optimized Content
- Technical SEO
- User Experience (UX)
- Website Links; Backlinks, Outbound Links & Internal Links
- Social Signals
- Genuine & True Business Information
- A Secure and Accessible Website
One of the first things that search engines look for when crawling your website is whether it is secure and accessible or not. This means, your website should have a valid SSL or TSL certificate to encrypt the data between your server and the user’s browser, and a robots.txt file. It will tell search engines what pages they can or cannot access. A secure and accessible website not only protects your users’ privacy and data, but also boosts your SEO by signaling trust and authority to search engines.
SSL or TLS is not a huge factor for Google to decide to index the page or not but John Mueller of Google revealed in a tweet that it is a “light-weight raking factor”
- Desktop & Mobile Page Speed
Another important factor that affects SEO is page speed – in fact the most ignored and undervalued factor! It is to the rating shows how fast your website loads on different devices and browsers. Page speed affects both user experience (UX) and search engine rankings. As users tend to bounce off (leave the page) where loading speed or time of the websites is slow. It is the main reason to be the important factor as search engines penalize websites that take too long to load and reward the websites which are fast!
To improve your page speed, you should optimize your images, minify your code, enable caching, use a content delivery network (CDN), and reduce server response time.
There 2 great free tools you can check your speed performance;
- Mobile Friendliness
As more and more people use mobile devices to access the internet, mobile friendliness has become a crucial factor for SEO, especially for Google. Mobile friendliness refers to how well your website adapts to different screen sizes and orientations, and how easy it is to navigate and interact with on mobile devices. A mobile-friendly website not only enhances user experience, but also improves your SEO by ranking higher on mobile searches and complying with Google’s mobile-first indexing policy. To make your website mobile-friendly, you should use a responsive design, avoid pop-ups, use large and legible fonts, and optimize your buttons and menus.
Google provides a free “mobile testing tool” to see how friendly your website for mobile devices.
- Domain Age, URL, and Authority
Another factor that affects SEO is your domain age. The domain age is how long your website has been registered and active online. It is a well-known fact that the highest raking websites in Google are the ones registered over 3 years. But there is an important factor; don’t ignore this! Google has penalized exact-match domains (those where the target keyword is in the URL), so be careful when you choose your domain.
URL is the address of your website. Instead of focusing on your domain, it is much better to create a URL structure that reflects your business and content of the pages.
Authority is how well your website is recognized and trusted by search engines and users. It contains how great your content is on your website. If you provide valuable and true information, your authority score will increase in time. You can check the authority with Open Site Explorer of MOZ.
These factors influence your SEO by indicating your credibility and relevance to your niche. To optimize these factors, you should choose a domain name that is short, descriptive, and keyword-rich, register your domain for a long period of time, and build your domain authority by creating high-quality content and earning backlinks from reputable sources.
- Optimized Content
Well established, true and valuable content is the heart of SEO. It attracts users so then search engines will value your website. Optimized content means relevant, engaging, informative and valuable to your target audience. It needs to match the user’s search intent and meet the expectations. Optimized content also follows SEO best practices, such as
- Using keywords strategically,
- Writing catchy titles,
- Optimized meta titles & meta descriptions,
- Using headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3,…),
- Adding images and videos,
- Linking to internal and external pages.
Optimized content not only increases your traffic and conversions but also boosts your SEO by ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and generating more social shares.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes optimization of SEO. It essentially affects how well your website performs on search engines and how well your website is optimized according to the guide of search engines. In other words, your optimization for search engines to crawl and index your website.
The followings are the ones where you should focus initially;
- Optimize Page Title, Meta Title and Meta description. Add keyword phrases (but avoid keyword stuffing) here; Google will first check these out.
- Use header tags (H1, H2, H3,…) to structure the content hierarchy
- Optimize your image titles and alt texts; use same strategy with fist point.
- Then optimize website structure, navigation, sitemap, schema markup, canonical tags, redirects, broken links, duplicate content, crawl errors, indexing issues.
To improve your technical SEO, audit your website regularly using tools like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, (SEMRush and ahref is great tools as well) fix any errors or issues that you find, and implement the latest SEO standards and guidelines.
- User Experience (UX)
User experience (UX) affects SEO indirectly but it is significantly important. UX refers to how users feel when they interact with your website. In other words, how users feel about your website. UX affects factors such as
- Dwell Time (how long users stay on your website)
- Bounce Rate (how often users leave your website without taking any action)
- Click-Through Rate or CTR (how often users click on your links)
- Conversion Rate (how often users complete a desired goal
UX also influences RankBrain (Google’s artificial intelligence system) which helps rank websites based on user behavior signals. To enhance UX and RankBrain signals for SEO purposes,
- Design your website with user needs in mind,
- Create clear and intuitive navigation,
- Provide useful and relevant content,
- Use attractive and consistent visuals,
- Optimize for different devices,
- Get feedback from users (aggregates or ratings).
- Website Links; Backlinks, Outbound Links & Internal Links
Links are to establish the authority, relevance and popularity of your website. Links can be divided into three types:
- Backlinks,
- Outbound Links,
- Internal Links.
Backlinks are links from other websites which send traffic to your website.
Outbound links are links from your website which send traffic from your website to other websites.
Internal links are links from one page of your website to another page of your website.
Links affect SEO by helping search engines crawl, discover new pages, determine the quality and value of your content and measure the trustworthiness and reputation of your website.
To optimize your links for SEO, get backlinks from high-authority and relevant websites, link out to reputable and useful sources and importantly link internally to related and important pages to help search engines to crawl and understand your website.
- Social Signals
Social signals are the interactions that users have with your content on social media platforms. Basically, users likes, shares, comments, retweets, pins, your posts or website in social media platforms. Social signals indirectly affect SEO. These are to increase your brand awareness, driving more traffic to your website, generating more backlinks and improving your online reputation. To leverage social signals for SEO
- Create engaging and shareable content,
- Promote your content on different social media channels,
- Encourage users to interact with your content,
- Monitor and measure your social media performance.
- Genuine & True Business Information
The last factor that affects SEO is real business information. Real business information refers to the details that you provide about your business on your website and on other online platforms, such as your name, address, phone number, email, logo, mission statement, etc. Real business information affects SEO by helping search engines verify the legitimacy and credibility of your business, and by helping users find and contact you easily. To optimize your real business information for SEO,
- Ensure that it is accurate,
- Consistent,
- Up to Date across all platforms,
- Create a Google My Business profile,
- collect and display customer reviews and testimonials.
If you want to rank higher on Google, you need to pay attention to the SEO ranking factors that affect your website’s performance. SEO ranking factors are rules used by search engines during the ranking process to decide which pages to show in the search e
