Top 16 SEO Site Level Factors that directly impact your website rankings on Google Search Engine.
-
Content Provides Value and Unique Insights: Google has stated that they’re happy to penalize sites that don’t bring anything new or useful to the table, especially thin affiliate sites.
-
Contact Us Page: The aforementioned Google Quality Document states that they prefer sites with an “appropriate amount of contact information”. Supposed bonus if your contact information matches your whois info.
-
Domain Trust/TrustRank: Many SEOs believe that “TrustRank” is a massively important ranking factor. And a recently-filed Google Patent titled “Search result ranking based on trust”, seems to back this up.
-
Site Architecture: A well put-together site architecture (for example, a silo structure) helps Google thematically organize your content. It can also helps Googlebot access and index all of your site’s pages.
-
Site Updates:Many SEOs believe that website updates — and especially when new content is added to the site — works a site-wide freshness factor. Although Google has recently denied that they use “publishing frequency” in their algorithm.
-
Presence of Sitemap:A sitemap helps search engines index your pages easier and more thoroughly, improving visibility.
-
Site Uptime: Lots of downtime from site maintenance or server issues may hurt your rankings (and can even result in deindexing if not corrected).
-
Server Location: Server location influences where your site ranks in different geographical regions (source). Especially important for geo-specific searches.
-
SSL Certificate: Google has confirmed that use HTTPS as a ranking signal. According to Google, however, HTTPS only acts as a “tiebreaker“.
-
Terms of Service and Privacy Pages: These two pages help tell Google that a site is a trustworthy member of the internet.
-
Duplicate Meta Information On-Site: Duplicate meta information across your site may bring down all of your page’s visibility. In fact, the Search Console warns you if you have too many of these.
-
Mobile Optimized:With more than half of all searches done from mobile devices, Google wants to see that your site is optimized for mobile users. In fact, Google now penalizes websites that aren’t mobile friendly.
-
YouTube: There’s no doubt that YouTube videos are given preferential treatment in the SERPs (probably because Google owns it ): In fact, Search Engine Land found that YouTube.com traffic increased significantly after Google Panda.
-
Site Usability: A site that’s difficult to use or to navigate can hurt rankings indirectly by reducing time on site, pages viewed and bounce rate (in other words, RankBrain ranking factors).
-
Use of Google Analytics and Google Search Console: Some think that having these two programs installed on your site can improve your page’s indexing. They may also directly influence rankings by giving Google more data to work with (ie. more accurate bounce rate, whether or not you get referral traffic from your backlinks etc.). That said, Google has denied this as a myth.
-
User reviews/Site reputation: A site’s reputation on sites like Yelp.com likely play an important role in Google’s algorithm. Google even posted a rarely candid outline of how they use online reviews after one site was caught ripping off customers in an effort to get press and links.
Check out the Series 1 – On Page SEO Tactics
Series 2 – More On Page SEO Tactics
