These are the links on your pages that direct users to other websites. When another site links to yours, it drives traffic and signals to search engines that the site trusts you. Effective off-page strategies help establish your site’s reputation and perceived value among users and search engines. Sites that engage users for long periods of time or visit multiple pages are ranked higher. Therefore both content quality and internal links play a big part in the pages per visit metric. I’ll explain what each of those user engagement ranking factors mean below and whether each of them can help you, or hurt you.
To rank well, help Google meet its goal by creating content that satisfies users and is original, unique, and reliable. While Google’s algorithms remain secret, optimizing for the top factors typically elevates a site and confers competitive advantage. Ranking higher on Google requires expertise, strategy, and deep market knowledge.
High-Quality Content
- In summary, Conversion Rate and Click-Through Rate are critical metrics for assessing and improving the performance of your SEO and content marketing strategies.
- From semantic search to featured snippets to AI results, the space keeps evolving.
- Thankfully, there is a way to tell both searchers and search engines that your page has moved — the 301 (permanent) redirect.
- But if you want your Google rankings to go from unseen to the top of the list, you have to be in the know.
- That’s because ChatGPT “formulates a keyword search based on your prompt,” submits it to Bing, and retrieves relevant results.
A NAP citation mentions your business’s name, address, and phone number online. They usually appear on business directories and social media profiles. Getting reviews on your Google Business Profile and elsewhere builds trust with Google and customers. The “regular” organic search results are the “ten blue links” that we’re all SEO Anomaly familiar with. Search engine optimization works by optimizing the above buckets to meet search engine best practices. Search engine optimization uses how search works to optimize a site for organic search results.
Search API
As far back as 2014, Google has discussed site security as a ranking factor. Now, it’s one of the most important Google ranking factors on this list. Sites with HTTPS encryption have SSL certificates that create a secure connection between a website and its users. It adds an extra layer of security that protects information exchanged between users and the site. The good news is that not all of the 200+ ranking factors are equal.
Google also uses information from other sources on the web, such as links and articles. Back when search engines lacked a lot of the sophistication they have today, the term “10 blue links” was coined to describe the flat structure of the SERP. Any time a search was performed, Google would return a page with 10 organic results, each in the same format. In terms of ranking web pages, engagement metrics act like a fact-checker.
Popular content management systems (CMS), like WordPress, provide a blank space for you to add alt text. The CMS then automatically adds the required HTML to that alt text. Search engines still include your URLs in your overall score – they just don’t hold the same prominence they once did. Once again, we have an excellent resource for more in-depth information on HTML image optimization.