Top Ten Google SEO Ranking Factors
People don’t really understand that there are many different factors that fall into place when determining where a website ranks in the Google search engine results. Some things to keep in mind when you are wondering why your site doesn’t rank well. It is not always just the obvious reasons that are holding it back.
Over the past years by reading Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, Google SEO Starter Guide, many other industry blogs and by actually doing professional SEO and internet marketing since the late 1990’s, I have gathered data and come to a boiled down short list of the most important Google search engine ranking factors.
Here is the list of my top 10 of important Google SEO ranking factors to consider:
1. Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. If you just bought your domain a few weeks or even months ago you have a long road ahead of you. The reality is the age of your website helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.
2. Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? Find out through your hosting company what continent or country your site is hosted in. This can often times play a large role in search rankings. Always use a reputable hosting company. If your company is US based then use a hosting company in the United States. Also, I always recommend a dedicated IP when you can. There are virtual dedicated and cloud hosting solutions that are more affordable. Never use the cheapest hosting. The reality is, if you cannot afford hosting you should re-consider the business…I know this is harsh but very true. 
3. Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server, which sites like Godaddy usually are have been known to house hundreds of websites on one server. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not classified as spam.
4. URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is part of the onsite search engine optimization process as well.
5. Content: Content is very important. To start make sure you have text on all your important pages, then make sure it is good text consisting of your targeted keywords spread throughout naturally. Simply put, ALWAYS write your content for humans, your website visitors first and NEVER write content for the solo purpose to achieve Google search engine rankings. Chances are the content will not be user focused or provide value to your visitors.
6. Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should have easy made pathways connecting to your other pages from every page of your website. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Essentially make sure the site is clean, easy to use and interlinked to help the user experience.
7. Trust: Do you at least have a mailing address listed on your website? You should if you don’t. Google likes to see trust factors on websites so anything you can add that could help build trust for your audience will benefit your rankings. I always recommend having a phone number on each page of your website. Make it easy for people to do business with you, it all starts with establishing trust and that starts with contact information on your website.
8. Keywords: Make sure your website is optimized using your keywords. This means any alt tags for images, meta page information and existing content at the very least of things. Remember to naturally optimize your website based on the content of each page of your website.
9. Bounce Rate: Although bounce rate might not seem important if Google sees that nobody hangs out on your website for more than a few seconds before they leave this could be a ranking problem over time. Make changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things, like video, newsletter sign up, call to actions, etc will help improve your bounce rate over time. Make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics.
10. Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. If you sell animals toys but you are linking to a site that sells shoes that is not very relevant and over time could really impact your rankings. Bottom line is if it makes sense to link to another site, then do so, but remember you could be sending your visitors away from your site.
11. Inbound Links: I know this was a list of my top 10, but I felt I had to mention inbound links. The key here (speaking as a white hat SEO person), don’t buy or exchange links. Market and promote your business online to build visitors to your website over time. If you do, then the relevant links will follow!
**Note: As the Google (and yes there are 2 other major search engines!) algorithm changes there are always new ranking factors that come into play, such as the page load time and many others. I am sure when I re-do this list a year from now, there may be another one or two additional factors.
There are many extensive factors that Google uses when determining website rankings. Very important to get these factors correct otherwise you could find yourself just spinning your wheels. The bottom line is it is all about relevancy and earning your visitors (and yes Google’s) search engine trust over time.
102 Responses to “Top Ten Google SEO Ranking Factors”
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Journal is Written by SEO Expert:
Nick Stamoulis
Tel - 781-999-1222
nick@brickmarketing.com
Brick Marketing - SEO Company
There is only once factor that is important according to Google. Write good content. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/quality-links-to-your-site.html
Yet they reward so many other things that are at the heart of SEO and “black hat” SEO.
Hi Shell,
Agreed, content is the backbone of SEO, but unfortunately sometimes the blackhat folks do well in Google as well…the question is long term can the black hat SEO folks do well? My thought has always been, a strong “NO”!
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and leaving your comment.
Nick
Nick, I wish I could agree with you, but for the most part black hat wins out and stays on top. check out the back links for this site: printedinchinaonline dot com. They have been ranking for “brochure printing” for months with no issues.
Too many sites are making it through with only link buying and blog commenting. Far too many.
Hi Shell,
Yeah, I see your point, either way, I always stay white hat, as I find that that has a much better long term result (not months, but years)…
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!
Nick
Hi Nick,
I think this is a great post for anyone looking to increase visibility online. I think that one thing I don’t hear many people talk about that you talked about so well is where is your site hosted, who are your neighbors, and choosing a dedicated IP. Very important but many times looked over.
Hi Christopher,
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Website hosting (the importance of) is so very important and is indeed a Google ranking factor that is often overlooked.
Thanks again!
Nick
Hi Nick,
Think you missed SEO template, cover the basics, add good content and then links should come.
There are hundreds of thousands of competing sites in most areas, find your niche and keep to it.
O and do not ever under appreciate the affect blogs can have for your ranking.
Hi Danny,
Great, points and yes a blog does help with your Google seo efforts…thanks for your comment!
Nick
Hi Nick,
My website is over a year old and I have recently had it redesigned. I was running it in wordpress last year. I have added content, fixed up meta info and started building links and yet I still have a page rank of 0. I am not sure where I am going wrong?? Any advice would be great
Really, very much of what will determine the success of an SEO campaign will be down to firstly, your internal and external linkages to your website, and then your actual on page optimisation; i.e. titles, header tags, keyword density, alt tags, title tags etc
Hi Nina,
Thanks for reading and sharing your story!
My question would be since you relaunched your website, re-optimized it and started link building have you increased your leads, visitors and overall business?
If the answer is yes (at a good ROI) then I would say you are on the right track. Personally, Google Pagerank (although is a Google ranking factor) should not be the success metric in determining how effective your campaign is…
I hope this helps and thanks again for reading!
Nick
Hey Nick, good article. I probably would have disagreed with 1 or 2 of your top 11 but most important is basic SEO. If folks just start with that they are way ahead of most of there competition. Some of your points like Trust (as you have termed it) were missing I feel it effects the site a lot less that say if title tags we missing so certainly best practice SEO is top 5. I do agree that by years end it will be very interesting to see what ranking signals will be at the top of the list. Thanks for your insites.
Hi Stuart,
Thanks very much for reading and sharing your thoughts!
Good article, but i definitely do NOT agree in the order you posted those..
I think that inbound links is number 1 on the list.
I am having the worse time getting this site optimized, well actually it is optimized it just refuses to function in search. i dont know what else to do!
Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks for reading…I might consider hiring an SEO consultant to help you with your SEO efforts! Maybe another set of eyes will help out at this point!
Thank you for sharing these great tips with others. In Bound Links is still the most critical factors in SEO practice!
Hi Li,
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts here…
Relevant inbound link building (and building your trust/brand) is a very important part of building your SEO program with Google and Bing/Yahoo.
Take Care,
Nick
Thanks for sharing the article, there are so many people who don’t want to share anything thinking that it will keep them ahead. I think inbound links are pretty important but I don’t see that being more important that website content. If you don’t have the content then you are going to have a high bounce rate with no click thru. If a site has good content, you are likely going to share it with other people, blog about it, and I will more than likely come back and look at any other information they may have to offer. My tip is, if you aren’t getting many people to stay on your site, consider changing the content around, offer a short survey and ask if they successfully found what they were looking for? If not ask them to leave a comment and let you know what they were looking and do a follow up with them. You might be missing content that everyone is looking for. Let your customers help guide your direction to make your site better. This will help with the content part of SEO.
I recently went for a business meeting with a company based in Lancashire UK called Dual Media, We were intrested in their services after what they had acomplished for a relative of mine’s website selling supplements products, There competing wit the likes of tesco and holland and barret in the search engines and doing it very well, in all hoesty I went into the meeting hoping to get some tips and tricks as I wanted to do most of the SEO myself and have researched the area on and off over the past 6 months and hands down I came out of the meeting with my head in a spin, Dual were very open about what they do and how they do it, they showed me on a projector where I was, where my competition was, how they got there and what was involved, they also showed me their check list of elements of a website both on and off that they do to make the website as friendly as possible to search engines. There list had over 200 factors on which most i just simply didnt understand, however if i pointed to one, they exaplined it and it all strted to make sense. What I did find clever is that they basically dont market the websites to try trick search engines, they make them as user friendly and easy to read for both a human and a robot, however a good website will attract its own attention and from the target audience when done right, They did show me what they do to some extent, but it wasnt filling the web with links pointing back to their websites, buying links or link exchanges. Think my point here is to go and see a SEO expert as it really is another world and not something your going to learn overnight, dual have been doing it 11 years and admit there still learning and always will be ! I ended up using dual, I dont think startups would be able to afford the fee however esablished companies with a marketing budget should consider it as the return will be well worth it, make sure your seo provider does you a report first to show what can and cant be achieved in sensible timescales, after you see what is involved I think you will admit these fees are realistic, I no longer have no intenetion of doing my own SEO as there is just hunderds of things to know and learn both off and on site, im not a programmer for a start so cant make the funcionaltiy of my website work properly. Anyway, rambeled on way too long here but thats my input ! I should also post a thankyou and link to dual for their efforts as I have nothing but positive things to say, hope thats ok ! http://www.dualmedia.co.uk
Andy
Your ten points are very good. Just want to add that the traffic to your site can also be a big determining factor that I believe Google looks at when they rank your site in search results.
John
SEO Expert and Marketing Manager
Very Helpful tips for seo, but the most important factor is ON page should be strong.
Hi Nick
Nice info and very good work generally. Greeks always have the answer
Yassou KyriakosF!
Thanks for reading and your comment!
Sensible list for anyone to follow. There are so many so called ‘seo’ experts out there it makes me cringe when they ignore the basics. Nice to know someone else is keeping it ‘simple’ and not bluffing the search engines. Any website I build is in it for the long haul so whitehat everytime, (even if it means those long dark nights
).
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thanks for a great post mate
can you elaborate more about optimizing keywords? I didn’t get what you try to convey actually
1 more things i want to ask that does broken internal links has an effect in low search engine ranking? You haven’t mention that but i still need some help over that
yes, its totally true. Google likes pages with trust. Always build reputation with your readers and customers and they will have faith on you.
I have got complete idea of google SEO ranking factors from this post, will try these tactics and implement on my website as well. thanks for sharing.
i still learn how to focus SEO… thanks for the artcle… nice share with you.. i will do it what do you write….. hope can help me… lol
Everything ist important – if someone want to be on top – has to work. Hard work. Jana
This has to be changed now. Google claims that you have to have “Original Content” for ranking higher. Well, does that mean Google should ranked the lowest because there’s no new content at all. It ranked lower mahalo and other “content farms”, which are highly possible “search engines”, or say, “competitors”. We at social deal map are providing our visitors aggregated deals from various social buying websites on a local neighborhood map, aka, Geo location based search on deals. We don’t have any extra new information other than from our source sites and Google now consider us as low quality content providers. Every search engine, in Google’s definition, now became content farms! Be aware, the “don’t do evil” evil!
I agree with Jana, getting to the top is hard work. Thanks for the great and interesting information.
Hi
As a newbie to internet marketing I have had a lot to learn in the last couple of months. I have recently produced my own WordPress site which is currently ranking number 26 after 4 weeks (in approx 12million). Given that you recommend Age as the first point hopefully it wion’t be long before I get on the first page especially as I will be added more content soon and You tube Video of me.
Anyway thanks for the advice
Bethan
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the good information article.. along with this tips if we could bring good quality links to our websites then we would stay top in Search Engines..
Hello!
I’m wondering how important is actually bounce rate? On my opinion that is much better vote from each visitor than numbers of links to the site. If the site has quality content that attract visitors, the visitors will probably spend some time on the site. And if the site is not quality and interesting the visitors will probably leave it very quickly. I don’t like the idea on spending so many time on link building instead of focusing on good and interesting site and marketing the site.
But is in reality really so important that you have the same amount of links than the competitors have if you want to compete with them or overtake some of them?
Thanks so much for this post, there always seems to be different people telling you a million things of what might work to rank higher in Google. Often, i have done further research and found that this info is wrong. This is a comprehensive and short list that confirms for me all that I have come to know about ranking
Interesting – what about sitemaps not much mention here – yet many say xml sitemaps make sites both easier for humans and search engines to find their way to relevant parts of site
Shell Harris said……for the most part black hat wins out and stays on top. check out the back links for this site: printedinchinaonline dot com. They have been ranking for “brochure printing” for months with no issues.
They’re not on top anymore. Of course Google is getting smarter – every day.
SEO is a very complex and an intelligent practice which needs constant update about various strategies and techniques invented by search engines. Web optimization using latest search engine methods gives more success to get good ranking in search engine result pages.
I dont know much about SEO, but I think tris is an excellent guide for a starter. Thanks for sharing.
I’m starting to think that time is a huge factor. I’ve only had my site up a little over 2 years and I can’t hit page one in the area I want to be in.
I’ve changed the actual area to Plano TX from other areas so maybe it’s time in that particular area?
The guy at the top has had his site there ever since i can remember.
I guess the point I’m getting at is it doesn’t seem to be how old a site is but how long it’s been optimized for those particular keywords. I’ve decided to stick it out and stay in the area and try to get to the top…or at least page one.
I believe my site is healthly, plenty of inbound and and internal links and it looks pretty good too.
Google places is king for a local business like mine but I still see guys getting above the locals. How does THAT work? I need that. lol
I’m working on different pages for nearby cities etc. I’m hoping that works.
I wonder is age of the page is a factor in ranking that particular page?
I’ve also heard that Google treats sites with over 100 pages differently?
But then I’ve also heard that Google indexes pages NOT websites.
Who know?
Hi, ive been trying for weeks to add links from high page rank site to mine, then told google checks the page rank every 2 -4 months or so. It looks like I gotta wait a while to notice any improvement. This SEO is a black art.
Hi there… Nick, fantastic post as always!
But I got one relevant point missing… It’s awfully more difficult to get a good position if you don’t spend mony on SEM, so that should be one of the relevant ones in your list! (this is real experience… we used to spend some €5,000 a month (yes, €, to get $, multiply by 1,4x) to promote our website, then suddenly dropping to €1,500, and our penalty was to be sent from page 1 to page 6 in one go!
So SEM is definetively a key point for SEO!
Nice listing of the top 10 SEO practices. I agree with all of them, and also some of the pointers mentioned by others above me here like Content. I believe content is what makes visitors stay and come back to your site, thus enhancing the stay-aboard time and negates the bounce rates.
Excellent and sensible info.
We have struggled with seo and after 14 months have reached a Google Rank of 1 for the home page.
This is interesting as we now trade about 700 cottage bookings a year with 25 in-bound links. One of our cottage members who started in 2007 has two cottages with one not active: http://www.ashtoncourtholidays.co.uk
They have a google rank of 3. Compared with a rank of 1 for http://www.countryholidaylets.co.uk this shows how important age of URL and presence on the web is.
We did not factor in free advertising through organic searches when we started out, had we relied on this, we wouldn’t have survived. Instead we spend heavily on Adwords which work well.
Google could easily abuse its dominant position… we feel it does not do this, but there are times when we do wonder when our perceived ‘importance’ will eclipse that of Ashton Court Holidays. (More power to their elbow)!
Could not agree to #10. There are too many examples that outbound links from unrelated sites helps rankings. DMOZ links to too many sites unrelated from DMOZ’s perspective, for example.
Hi Nick
Great clear information, I have found the domain age really affects ranking, so don’t give up if you don’t do well soon. Also research your market and make sure it is worth spending valuable time on.
Hi,
I’ve spent almost 1 1/2 year optimizing our website and building links to it and I still don’t get on first page of google. But interestingly, I get Pagerank 4 for one of our sites. I like your list, but I am beginning to believe that content – lots of it is the way to go after the Panda update and yes Trust!.
Thanks for the list.
Ist not easy to compete when you are a SEO, but the good thing is that all these litle things make you keep an open mind, working really really hard and to put your imagination (or creativity) to work. Ist not enought to wish to be the number onw, you alson need to be very patiente and work hard….
thanks for the article