3 Key Google Ranking Factors You Need for Better SEO

If you want to use your website as a tool for finding new customers, you better know how to optimize it for Google’s Search Engine. With billions of searches every day and 89.95% of the search engine market share, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of your potential customers are using Google to search for your product or service online. The catch is that Google has a very complicated algorithm that uses about 200 ranking signals to determine organic search page rankings, and they aren’t sharing that algorithm with anyone. So it’s up to marketers to figure out how to use search engine optimization to make sure a website shows up on Google’s search engine. Even if we did know all 200 or so ranking signals, it would be nearly impossible to address them all, so here are three Google ranking factors that we believe are the most important if you want to optimize your website for the Google search engine.

If you search for Power Marketing International, you will see the URL at the top - https://www.powermarketinginternational.com/. The HTTP at the very beginning of the URL stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol – a process that transfers information from a website to the viewer’s browser. The added “S” shows that your connection to our website is secure and encrypted, so the information between you and our site is safe. It’s no surprise that Google prefers to see that “s” in a website URL, and many of your visitors will too. If you don’t see the “s” in your website’s URL, you should acquire an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate.

Also known as backlinks or external links, inbound links are hyperlinks that are on other websites that link back to your website. In the last paragraph, you’ll notice that you can click on “SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate,” and you will be taken to HubSpot’s website. That is an inbound link for HubSpot. The more links, and the higher the popularity and relevance of the links that connect to your website, the better your ranking will be, all else being equal. Google looks at inbound links as an important sign that your site can be trusted. By the way, internal links to other pages within your website do NOT count as inbound links. Here are a few link building strategies:

• Regularly posting great content on your blog
• Writing guest blog posts
• Linking to other blogs
• Monitoring your competitors’ backlinks
• Installing social share widgets on your website

Keep in mind that not all backlinks are created equal. Some backlinks carry more weight than others, and some backlinks can even hurt your website’s ranking. Based on our experience, a good backlink has the following qualities:

• The link is relevant to your website
• The link is coming from a website that is trusted by Google. Trusted websites include sites like HubSpot or Huffington.
• The link is coming from a website with “Domain Authority,” which is calculated using an algorithm. There are several online tools you can use to check a website’s Domain Authority. A Domain Authority above 20 is desirable. Above 30 is strong. Above 40 is exceptional.

Well-placed keywords on your website have always been essential to Search Engine Optimization. In the early days, Google looked for the most keywords on a webpage or blog. Those keywords had to be an exact match. If you sold “organic plant fertilizer,” you would strategically place that 3-word phrase in several places throughout your page. Today, Google is more focused on the “intention” of the searcher than it is about exact keyword matches. So it’s no longer enough to place that keyword phrase “organic plant fertilizer” throughout the page. Instead, you need to use it along with variations of the phrase, and also include words and phrases that represent the intention of the searcher. For example, by speaking about organic plant fertilizer ingredients, why they’re better than non-organic, how they help plants, where they can be purchased, etc. This strategy has a better chance of pushing your webpage to the top of the rankings because this is what people interested in organic plant fertilizer are looking for, so it will create more engagement and more time spent on the page, which will cause Google to rank that page higher.

Focusing on these three key ranking factors should help improve your website’s rankings; however, if you want to so that really well, while also addressing the 197 or so additional rankings used by Google, you will need a professional marketer who is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert. That is where Power Marketing International excels. Give us a call at 484-297-6395 or contact us online and enjoy the results that an online marketing strategy built on exceptional web design and smart SEO can deliver!