UA For effective SEO promotion, it’s important to know what affects a website’s rankings in search engines and which actions help drive growth. Google takes a whole range of factors into account for each page and for the site as a whole, and in this article we’ll walk you through the most significant ones. For convenience, we’ve split everything that affects a site’s SEO promotion into five groups.
Factors that affect a website’s SEO promotion:
- Domain
- Content
- On-page optimization
- External links
- Behavioral factors
Domain
You can influence a site’s future rankings even before it’s built. To do that, it’s important to choose the right domain. Search engines take into account:
- The domain name. This can be the most relevant keyword for promotion, or a brand name. The second option is especially worthwhile if you plan to run this business long-term and build the company’s reputation.
- The domain zone. International, national, regional, or niche — the choice depends on your geography and the specifics of your business.
- Prior history and age. The older a site is, the more authoritative it looks to search engines. That’s why many people prefer buying domains with history . But age is far from the only thing that affects SEO promotion. The domain’s past matters too, both the good and the bad. If a domain was previously penalized, reaching top rankings will be very difficult.
Content
The factors that affect a site’s promotion need to be accounted for from the very start of work on the resource. Text content plays one of the key roles here, as it’s a basic SEO tool. High-quality copy shows both the search engine and the user that a page fully answers a specific query. To have a positive effect on your site’s rankings and reach the top of the search results, you need to:
- Optimize the text for specific topical queries. They need to be worked in naturally and not stand out from the overall context;
- Keep keyword density at an optimal level and avoid over-optimization;
- Publish content that’s as unique, expert, and genuinely useful to users as possible.
- Structure the text — break it into paragraphs, bold the important points, use bullet and numbered lists, headings and subheadings. All of this affects readability, and therefore SEO too.
- Update information in a timely way to keep it current. But text isn’t the only thing that affects SEO. When optimizing a site, it’s important to use different types of content: images, photos, infographics, video.
On-Page Optimization
It’s important to understand what affects SEO, including a number of technical aspects that, while present on every site, can be implemented very differently. Pay attention to:
- Security. Check your site for viruses and malware, use reliable hosting, and use the HTTPS protocol. All of this affects not only your rankings but also how loyal your relationship with users becomes.
- Loading speed. If your site is slow and visitors have to wait more than 3 seconds for each page to load, you can forget about high rankings. The faster your site loads, the better.
- Responsiveness. Don’t forget that the smartphone era is here, and if your site isn’t adapted for mobile devices, you’ll lose a significant share of traffic. With Google’s move to mobile-first indexing, the search engine now crawls mobile content first, which makes this one of the factors with the biggest impact on SEO promotion.
- Structure. SEO includes working through a site’s structure and navigation. Users need to be able to find the information they need easily and move between pages comfortably. If you make a serious mistake here, every subsequent stage of work will be noticeably less effective.
- Correct robots.txt and sitemap.xml files. If search engines can’t see your site, you can forget about any further SEO promotion at all.
- No duplicate pages. Duplicates are one of the factors that hurt a site’s rankings by degrading how it’s ranked. Thoroughly check your site for duplicate pages and remove them promptly.
- Meta tags. Each page’s Title and Description need to be as relevant as possible to the queries you’re targeting.
External Links
The factors that affect a site’s rankings in search engines also include its external link profile. SEO promotion involves placing links on external donor sites. Search engines take these into account, but there are a few nuances. Links should:
- Be placed on authoritative, topically relevant sites with a good reputation. It’s better to have fewer, higher-quality links. Simply blasting directories no longer works and is more likely to hurt your site than help it.
- Be as natural as possible — placed right when an article is published, positioned in an area visible to users, and actually get clicked on by users.
- Be built up smoothly and gradually, keeping an optimal ratio of anchor-text to non-anchor links (30/70 on average).
Behavioral Factors
User experience affects SEO promotion and where a site ranks in search results one way or another, so it’s important to make things as comfortable as possible for visitors. Analyzing behavioral factors and web analytics in general helps you find weak spots in a project, improve usability, and increase both the number of orders and your conversion rate. During an audit, pay attention to metrics like:
- traffic source;
- bounce rate;
- pages per session;
- session duration;
- conversion rate.
In Short
It’s important to know what affects a site’s search rankings and to take all of these factors into account during SEO optimization. This will let you achieve noticeable results within just a few months of work.
If you’d like our company, WebDev&SEO, to take on your project’s promotion, leave a request, message us on Instagram @webdev_and_seo or call us at 093 93 111 43, and we’ll calculate the cost of the work and give you a free consultation.
