The saying goes “Content is King,” and that is absolutely true. Content that is at least three hundred words gets crawled and indexed by Google. This is one of the most important aspects of SEO and is a major factor in how Google determines their rankings.
Authoritative Links
Links are with content in terms of the most important factors of SEO to get the absolute best possible rankings for a site. Building backlinks is critical. You can do this through blogging and posting links in blogs, forums, and chat sites.
Social Shares
As social shares move from a fad to a way of life, they are making more and more of an impact in SEO. Google realizes the importance of Facebook’s shares and Twitter followers. Facebook has almost one billion users, so there shares, likes, comments, and followers can have a huge impact on a site’s rankings.
Domain Age
Domain age is an SEO factor that most people wouldn’t consider without being informed about it. The older a domain is, the more authority it passes. That’s why it’s important to find and register an older domain as opposed to starting a new one that won’t have any authority.
Number of Pages
This aspect of SEO seems as if people would naturally take it into account, but people don’t. Obviously Google is going to check to see how many pages a site has. The more pages a site has, the more likely it is that that site is being updated regularly and is worth having at the top of the rankings.
User Engagement – Time on Site / Bounce Rate
Google wants to know how much time the average user spends on your site. If the time on site is high, then people clearly enjoy being on that site for extended periods of time. If a site’s time on site is poor, then people clearly don’t have any interest in being there, so Google doesn’t want to have these sites near the top of their rankings.
Overall Website Relevance to a Search term
Google wants to have sites at the top of the searches that make sense for that search. There’s no point in having a sports website come up when somebody searches for life insurance. That’s why it’s important for your site to be fully relevant to the keywords that you’re optimizing for.
Link Acquisition Rate
Google wants to see links that are built up at a natural rate; they don’t want to see a bunch of links all added at one time. That’s why it’s important to have a steady increase in links. It can’t look unnatural. To perform SEO, you need to know the natural link acquisition rate that a certain keyword and site receive to maximize their rankings.
By Wyatt Yep, a staff writer at Rank Executives, a top flight SEO business from central Florida.