How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Therefore, new, relevant keywords are used for current analyses, such as “Samsung Galaxy S5” or “iPhone 6”, which did not exist previously. SEO is free, but it requires time and effort to implement effectively. Paid tools and services, such as keyword research tools, analytics platforms, and professional consulting, can also assist with SEO. Also, research from Ziff Davis shows LLMs like Open AI prefer content from authoritative websites. Hence, optimizing for SEO increases your chances of appearing in generative search features like AI overviews, ChatGPT, and Claude AI.

Site-wide signals and classifiers are also used and contribute to our understanding of pages. Several different types of links affect how your content ranks in search results. Using relevant, descriptive anchor text can increase the impact of these links.

seo ranking factors

Things Mistaken for Google Ranking Factors

seo ranking factors

Your website should be always up and running to keep serving the content to visitors and search engine bots. Create relevant content about the local area and share on your social channels, email lists and GBP. Also reach out to relevant local website owners and encourage them to link to your content.

If you’re running a WordPress site, you can set up a sitemap via All in One SEO. However, this is impractical for larger sites with hundreds of pages, so you’ll likely want an SEO tool to help you out. Before improving your SEO ranking, you’ll need to know your starting point. Once your page lands on the SERP, you have to rely on your page titles and meta descriptions to get searchers to click your link and visit your site. Google has various deeply complex algorithms to decide which content gets displayed and in which order. Explore the largest, fastest, and freshest backlink management tool.

Content freshness

seo ranking factors

How people search, whether as a consumer or business buyer, is changing. Announced in and given the nickname of the “Penguin Update”, it was integrated into our core ranking systems in 2016. RankBrain is an AI system that helps us understand how words are related to concepts. It means we can better return relevant content even if it doesn’t contain all the exact words used in a search, by understanding the content is related to other words and concepts. We regularly improve our ranking systems through rigorous testing and evaluation and provide notice of updates to our ranking systems when those might be useful to content creators and others. When you include structured data, it can give your content an additional opportunity to rank near the top of search results.

seo ranking factors

By monitoring these local search ranking factors, the tool helps businesses understand their strengths and weaknesses in local SEO and identify areas for improvement. Our data shows there is no correlation between “page load time” (either document complete or fully rendered) and ranking on Google’s search results page. This is true not only for generic searches (one or two keywords) but also for “long tail” searches (4 or 5 keywords) as well.

  • In the past, many website owners tried to improve their website’s ranking by repeating or including various keywords on their pages without any context or additional value.
  • Track your SEO rankings to gauge the success of your SEO strategy.
  • If you know your way around redirects, optimizing page speed, crawlability, security and structured data, make those your first priority.
  • While the above seven Google page ranking factors are important, it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

Crawling: How search engines discover content

To be helpful, we need a step-by-step checklist for ranking a page starting from an idea, all the way to traffic pouring into your Google Analytics account. But an unnatural link profile with tons of low-quality or spammy backlinks can trigger Google penalties. Sites with a high percentage of links coming from unrelated or irrelevant sites rank lower. So make sure any links pointing to your site are relevant to your niche. Using “sponsored” or “UGC” (User Generated Content) link tags helps Google understand the nature of your links. Doing link building in the right way can be tricky so take a look at all of the factors below or just use a service like LinksThatRank or any of these other BHS Links guest posting services to help.

seo ranking factors

Start by brainstorming search terms that align with your products or services. Tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you discover additional keywords. SEO rank trackers are focused on monitoring keyword rankings, helping you assess your site’s performance over time. Tools like Serpple stand out as affordable solutions, enabling you to track keywords without breaking the bank.