10 SEO Factors That Can Skyrocket Your Website’s Ranking

If you’re looking to rank your website’s pages organically, proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the way to go. 

What is Search Engine Optimization? (SEO)

SEO is a set of practices done on and off the website to make it suitable and ready to rank on search engines. Often, businesses get overwhelmed by several technicalities of SEO. So much so that they miss to cover important SEO factors in their strategy and struggle to rank their website’s important pages on Search Engines. 

Keeping this problem in mind, we have listed ten important factors for you. Including these factors in your SEO strategy will improve your website’s rankings and help you achieve your marketing goals. 

Have a look. 

Important SEO Factors

301 redirect

Also known as a permanent redirect, a 301 is the most search-engine-friendly way to redirect website traffic when the URL of a website changes. 301 redirects will automatically send all direct and search engine traffic to the new destination.

For example, if an unimportant page of your website (say, post archives) is indexed or ranking in search engines, you can redirect it to your homepage. 

Algorithm Awareness

Algorithms refer to the formula used by search engines to determine where a web page should be ranked. Having an in-depth knowledge of Google’s algorithms will help you avoid certain practices that can lead to your website getting penalized. 

ALT text 

An essential part of your on-page SEO, ALT text is the description you add to an image. Search engines can’t determine the meaning of your images, so alt text is the best way to tell the web crawlers what the content is. alt text is also important for usability as visually impaired users rely on this to work out what the graphics are. You can include your primary keyword in the alt text for better rankings. 

Backlinks

A backlink refers to any link that is pointing back to your website. They can be seen as votes given by other websites in favor of your websites to search engines, advocating in favor of your website’s credibility. Link Building is one of the most crucial aspects of SEO that can make or break a website’s rankings. 

Bounce rate

The bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who enter your site and exit on the same page without navigating around or clicking any links. The lower it is, the better your web pages will rank. Make sure you have submitted the sitemaps and done enough internal linking to reduce the bounce rate of your website. 

Click-through-rate 

Often abbreviated as CTR, this refers to the percentage of website visitors who click on a particular link. Simply put, this is the number of people who have clicked through to your website or content out of the number of people who were exposed to the link. The higher the CTR, the better it is for your website. 

Deep linking 

This is the process of linking to pages deeper within your site, as opposed to just sending traffic to your home page. This increases both their search engine authority and visibility. It also increases the time spent on the website, decreasing the bounce rate. 

Impressions

This refers to the number of times your advert or page has been seen by internet users. It doesn’t refer to the number of clicks, so it will always be higher than your visits. This does give you an indication of your potential audience reach, though. So, the higher the impressions, the better it is for your website. 

Keyword 

Keywords or key phrases are the terms you’re optimizing the individual pages of your website for. These can be split into long-tail and short-tail, based on the length of the phrase and the number of potential visitors. Keywords should be words that internet users actually search for. Make sure you’re selecting keywords with high search volume and low competition. 

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the phrases that appear under your URL in the search results. This should sum up your page and what users will gain from clicking the link. Characters are limited though, so you need to keep it concise and snappy. Here are the character limits:

• Title: 60 characters
• Description: 135-150 characters

Final Word

SEO isn’t daunting, it only requires the right knowledge, expertise, and implementation to see results. These factors will help you better understand SEO. However, it’s always advisable to leverage expertise when it comes to SEO. You can search for an SEO company in Auckland if you’re based in New Zealand.