Does your website show up on page one, or is it floating somewhere in the page-three plus wasteland of search results?
If your business has a website, there’s little use in searching for your business name to gauge how your website is performing in terms of rankings. Searching for your business name in Google will only tell you that people who already know your business name – family, friends, and existing clients – will be able to find your website online when they look you up specifically.
But what about new clients? They don’t know your business name yet, so using this as a test to determine how well your website “ranks” in Google is completely useless!
Google doesn’t rank websites based on their business name, otherwise it would be an alphabetical directory listing (like the White Pages); it bases them on good structure, the quality of the content they contain, the quality of their links, use of keywords and phrases and many more factors.
In fact, Google takes into account around 200 factors when determining where your website will fall in the list of search results! Sound overwhelming? Well, it can be and not only that but the rules are always changing.
A professional web developer will be across the many factors affecting how your website ranks in Google. And in case you need reminding, approximately 95 percent of all Internet users are on Google. So if you’re wondering why we focus on Google – it’s because that’s where all the Internet users are! Google is, and will continue to be, the global authority on information.
So when we stumbled across this article, the Ultimate List of Google Ranking Factors, we found ourselves nodding and smiling from the top of the list to the bottom. It’s comprehensive and we think it’s bang-on the mark. Some of the factors are more critical than others and we do place an emphasis on the more critical factors, but we take into account everything on this list and are capable of implementing it all. Any web developer should have a good understanding of this list and be able to implement as much of it as is applicable – remembering that every business is different and so is every website.
The 200 ranking factors are grouped into the following:
- domain factors, including the age of your domain and whether a keyword appears in the domain
- page-level factors, including use of keywords in page title and page content
- site-level factors, overall good content – relevant, useful and genuine – and an appropriate amount of contact information on the contact page
- backlink factors, including the number of site-level pages linking to one another and tagging images with keywords in the Alt Text option
- user interaction, including direct and repeat traffic and the time spent on the site by Internet users
- special algorithm rules, including boosting fresher content in search results above “old content”, which is why we recommend blogging on a regular basis to produce fresh content
- social signals, basically the level of interaction with social media accounts linked to your business and your use of Google+ and Rel Auth codes
- brand signals, including whether people are searching for your brand or mentioning your brand on other sites
- on-site webspam factors, means sites with poor quality and/or thin content, keyword stuffing and more
- off-page webspam factors, unnaturally high level of unrelated links to your website, such as paid links.
View and save the full list in an infographic for future reference from makeuseof.com
If you’d like to ask us questions about what a web developer should and shouldn’t do, please contact us. Based in Geelong we build websites that work for small business clients all over Australia. We guarantee to get your website ranking in Google for agreed upon keywords and target locations.