The 3 key factors on which your site ranking depends

Increase site visits : but why?

 

Conquering the top positions of the results on search engines through SEO optimization and the improvement of the ranking allows to increase visits on the website or blog, and therefore to reach users possibly belonging to a specific target. This translates into more opportunities to increase the profits of your investments.

Reaching the top positions, however, is not easy: you need a strategy, you need a method, you need knowledge, because you need to offer a site and content that users and therefore search engines like. To achieve this ideal state we should follow the rules governing SEO (Search Engine Optimization ) or optimization for search engines.

SEO, although it is constantly evolving and even if the needs of the user and therefore Google's evaluation criteria change, basically develops on three factors:

·         40% SEO content: content optimized for search engines

·         40% Link Building: strategies for obtaining quality incoming links

·         20% SEO technique: general site optimization

But before going into detail let's take a step back in time, to better understand how Google reasons.

When SEO was born and how sites were classified

In the 90s, with the spread of the first search engines, webmasters realized that by acting on some factors it was possible to  manipulate the positioning of the sites  for certain queries (the searches of users on search engines). The SEO of the early days was this: it was necessary to give the search engine algorithms the highest number of keywords, filling the site with the keywords that most interested them.

The birth of Google and PageRank

When Google arrived in 1998 , PageRank was introduced , which assigned a value to each web page, also taking into consideration the amount of incoming links (backlinks). This is because the more a site was authoritative and the more it was linked. In theory. The reality soon turned out to be another: PageRank could also be manipulated, through the creation of artificial backlinks. In order to obtain incoming links, no one looked at quality or relevance, and a real link trade started.

Google's algorithm: Panda and Penguin

Google has intervened, and continues to intervene, in the fight against the manipulation of the SERP in order to further improve the results it provides to users: it knows that if it wants to remain the most used search engine in the world, it must not disappoint those who entrust it to it his research.

So, periodically, it updates its algorithm . Among the best known upgrades are Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012), which have drastically reduced the presence of poor quality sites from search results. The algorithm today penalizes sites that:

·         they try to get around it with artificial link building activities

·         they practice keyword stuffing (i.e. an unnatural and forced presence of keywords)

·         sites not updated and / or with poor quality content

·         non-user friendly and difficult to consult sites

·         slow sites

·         unsafe sites.

SEO 2018: what will your site's ranking depend on?

The future concerning SEO is interesting: more and more users are turning to Google through voice search, and if before we typed on Google " Gray man coat ", today we ask Google "Are you looking for a long and gray coat for men? ". This means that not only will the search queries change, but that Google will try to provide more and more specific results : that's why we will have to start working on "long tail" keywords, that is, less and less generic and more detailed keywords.

New Google algorithm: what changes with Fred

In March 2017, Fred was introduced , which is still in the process of settling and which we will probably see in the protagonist of 2018.

This upgrade aims to refine the search results , and it is evident from the fact that some generalist sites have undergone organic declines in favor of sites that deal with narrower and specific topics, with a more niche focus.

This is because Google is trying to offer a SERP with a more precise and marked search intent , with results that answer users' questions with less broad and generic content and more targeted.

Industry experts will certainly benefit from this, and will acquire authority over specific and well-studied topics.

How to create SEO content that readers and search engines enjoy

Google rewards sites that satisfy the requests of its users: if the user, after reaching the site, reads the entire article and perhaps also navigates other pages, Google records that action, which improves the authoritativeness of the site about the query typed by the user.

So rather than writing content for search engines, we should write for the user . But to get traffic to our site, we need to create content that answers the questions people ask search engines, otherwise it will be like giving our best speech to two or three people rather than to a crowd of people.

1. Choose your keywords

To get quality traffic to our site, we need to identify those keywords that can potentially interest our niche but have a minimum of searches per month. To identify these keywords, tools such as:

·         SEOzoom , which also features other useful SEO features

·         Answer the public , free, and useful especially for related keywords

·         Google Keyword Planner , free but not very specific.

2. Build an SEO structure for the article

After we have identified our main and related keywords, we must study the structure of our article. With the secondary keywords we can develop the various paragraphs. The main keyword should be present on:

·         Title, possibly at the beginning;

·         Permalink;

·         Body text, especially in the first paragraph, if not in the first sentence;

·         ALT image (possibly on the highlighted image / cover image;

Meta description

3. Create valuable content

Remember that we write to give value to the user , because we have to make sure that he reads all our article, that he finds it useful. We are specific, clear, synthetic, we do not fuck other people's contents but we are original. If we are specialized on a specific topic we must make sure that our expertise reaches the reader.

SEO optimization of a site

But SEO, as we said at the beginning, is not just content: it is not enough to optimize articles if the site that contains them is not optimized.

In turn, the site must be supported by a valuable link building strategy (incoming links continue to have a significant weight in the indexing of a site, but they must be carefully selected, as they must be relevant and come from valuable sites ).

The key aspects to pay attention to, in the technical optimization of a site, are:

1.       Meta tags

2.       The Robots.text file

3.       The Sitemap

4.       The importance of tree site

5.       The user experience and mobile friendly sites

How to check the technical optimization of a site

To do a site audit and check if a site is technically optimized, you can use these tools:

·         SEOptimer

·         SEOsiteCheckup

·         WooRank

How to check content optimization

To monitor the positioning of a site and individual contents, you can use:

Google Search Console : Google's free service that allows you to monitor and manage various aspects of a site's online presence, as well as the indexing status, keywords and any security problems;

SemRush : SemRush is also a suite for SEO and link building strategy, but it is foreign and takes into account the first 100 results for a given keyword (SEO zoom of the first 50);

Google Analytics : Google Analitycs is a free service offered by Google, which allows you to fully monitor a website, showing statistics and data relating to user access.

How to monitor incoming links

Incoming links must be constantly monitored: only in this way can you notice a Negative SEO attack or in any case receive poor quality links. Negative SEO is a technique used by attackers: they cause a series of inbound links of very low value to arrive on the site to be hit, so as to induce a penalty by Google.

To monitor the incoming links, you can rely on the aforementioned:

·         Search Console

·         SEMRush

·         SEOzoom

To analyze instead the value of a link and the credibility at the link building level of a site:

Majestic : in the free version we can obtain data on Trust Flow (indicates the quality of the sites from which the incoming links come) and Citation Flow (indicates the number of incoming links). The level of reliability of a site is obtained by intersecting these 2 data: the higher the index the more reliable a site.

Also Read: SEO NYC Company

Moz (which also has a valid toolbar): provides data on the Domin Autorithy and Page Autorithy of a site and its pages.