Have you ever wondered how search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo decide which websites to rank first when you search for something? It's a complicated process, but understanding the basics of how search engines rank websites can help you optimize your website and increase your chances of appearing high on search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this article, we'll explore the key SEO ranking factors that influence how search engines rank websites, as well as provide some tips on how to optimize your website for higher rankings.
How Do Search Engines Rank Websites?
To understand how search engines rank websites, we first need to clarify the 3 steps of Googlebot's process. Googlebot is the bot they send to your website to gather information.
1) Googlebot comes to your site, "crawls" the information and takes it back to Google HQ. This is the Crawling Process.
2) Your information is put through an extremely advanced algorithm that uses SEO Ranking Factors to decide where to place your website. This is the Indexation Process.
3) Once that decision is made, your website goes through the Listing Process, where you are listed on Google.com as well as others.
#1 and #3 are fairly self-explanatory, so let's dive into what the ranking factors are.
SEO Ranking Factors
SEO ranking factors are key components in understanding how search engine algorithms determine website rankings. Basically, search engines will use a variety of factors to determine how a website should be ranked in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
These factors can include things such as:
the quality and relevance of content on the website
the speed of the website
how safe the website is to visit
the size of the codebase
backlinks
the amount of traffic a website receives
and many other factors
As a website owner, it is important to understand how search engines rank websites so you can optimize your website accordingly. By understanding the SEO ranking factors and how they work, you can improve your website's ranking and visibility.
What are the most important factors?
Google doesn't outright give us the ranking factors in order of importance (most of the time), but SEOs generally have a good idea based on how their sites react to certain projects. Our current ranking factor list puts these three first:
1) Site Speed & Performance (particularly on mobile)
2) Helpful Content (pay attention to user scroll length and how well they interact with the content)
3) Backlinks
Those 3 are always near the top, so it's no real surprise that we're seeing them get the most movement again. Backlinks are a weird one because they're very difficult to execute on and it's often good to let the client handle that and guide them through their business connections to generate backlinks.
As an SEO, you simply need to know site speed and performance like the back of your hand. Use Pagespeed Insights, do their recommendations (even if they seem silly), and be absolutely sure your site is mobile friendly. Also, make sure your LCP (Least Contentful Paint) is below 2.5 seconds. LCP measures the times before your largest image or text block is loaded, which gets the user started on viewing the site.
On the topic of helpful content, this ones simple: Google needs answers to questions, and users have a lot of questions. If you provide good, well thought out, well formatted answers then Google will appreciate it and reward you. It's as simple as that.
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