We all know that SEO is very important to make our blog Search Engine Friendly. To get our work done we go for many on-page & off-page optimization steps. For on-page optimization we work on our own blog so that it gets direct benefits. Again in off-page optimization we work on other blogs so that our blog gets both direct and indirect benefits.
On-page optimization helps in:
i) Search Engine Optimization / Better Ranking in Search. (Directly)
ii) More Traffic. (Directly)
iii) Better user experience. (Directly)
iv) More traffic from social sites. (Indirectly)
Off-page optimization helps in:
i) Search Engine Optimization. (Directly)
ii) More Backlinks & Traffic. (Directly)
iii) Brand exposure. (Directly)
iv) More Subscribers. (Indirectly)
There are more benefits of On-page & Off-page optimizations as well. So today in this article I’m going to discuss about those factors that help in achieving better search engine ranking (whether it may be directly or indirectly).
Let us start discussing all the important Google search engine ranking factors one by one:
1. Quality Content on your blog
Quality content is the first and foremost thing a blog requires. It’s the main reason why people visit a blog. The users want to get their work done and so they click on your links. I don’t need to tell anything more about quality content here as we have many times talked about the power of quality content on HellBound Bloggers (HBB). So today I will just give you some tips to make your blog post stand out. It may be a guest post or your blog’s post, these tips work in both the cases.
#1 Tip: Optimize your post for the search engines.
#2 Tip: Promote it on Social Media Sites.
#3 Tip: Add relevant meta-tags, images and heading tags.
#4 Tip: Write on Mass wanted & controversial topics.
#5 Tip: Proofread your posts for better reading experience.
2. Keywords on your page
We always talk about keyword research, keyword optimizing and keyword ranking. We work on them so that we can dominate the search engines. But if we don’t have a good knowledge on them then we may be hurting our blog. We may either be doing less optimization or over optimization. In both the cases our blog suffers a lot.
Let me tell you that while searching for the best keywords we should always pick up the low competitive ones; but those keywords should get more searches too. Now, many of the bloggers try to keep a keyword percentage of 2-3% while doing keyword optimization and when they can’t make it out they do keyword stuffing i.e. repetition of the keywords unnecessarily and here is where they do the mistake. Unnecessary repetition makes our work look artificial and then they lose respect from the search engines.
Google has never told us to keep a keyword percentage of 2-3 in our posts; rather they have told us to keep the targeted keywords on our page. This simply helps in getting better ranks and exposure in search. Also remember to optimize your images by adding alt tags to them.
3. The Heading Tags
The heading tags, which many bloggers think, don’t play any role in search engine ranking is quite a wrong concept. Matt Cutts from Google said that they are still important ranking factors. The tags h1 and h2 are still helping Google in identifying what the content is about. They help the search engines in exposing your content to targeted audience. To get more out of these tags you can even add your keyword to one of the heading tags. It will simply help you in achieving better ranks in search.
4. Relevant Meta tags
Meta-tags are not major factors now as they are no more used by the search engines to decide the rank for your link. But relevant meta tags are still playing a great role to make search engines understand what your content is about.
They help the bloggers in two ways:
i) To reach the right audience in search engines.
ii) To give the users a reason to click on the links.
A user will never click a link which has an irrelevant meta-tag. So you should always remember to add a manual meta-tag which is relevant to your blog post.
5. Niche Blogging
Generally when users type something on Google they show the results from authorized niche sites. Only sometimes they show results from multiple niche sites. The secret behind it is that Google and other search engines love niche sites. They give more attention to them. So you should always try to build up a niche site. Talking of several topics related to different niches in the same blog is not a good idea.
First thing is that it makes the blog messy where less targeted traffic is gathered and the second is that search engines don’t give a damn to them. Today I see that many of the pro bloggers are going out of their niche. The only reasons I think why they don’t get hit by panda like updates are that they are now authorized ones and even if they add different niche’s topics they never ignore quality and finally somehow they relate those posts to their niche.
HELPFUL: Easy Way To Choose A Perfect Niche For Your Blog
6. Social Media Presence
They are not do-follow sites but still they help, how? The media sites are high PR sites i.e. they have good reputation in front of search engines. So when your readers share your blog links in social media sites the search engines love to see that. The reason behind this love is that your blog is being shared by users and that means you have worthy content. Again search engines also like the blogs who have social connections/ pages in social sites because it feels real. And Google like real things. So you can just take the full benefits of the Social media sites. They are planets of huge population having users of every interest. You just need to find the interested ones by making unique groups and pages.
7. Readability of a blog post
Google always want to help users and so they show the right results to everyone. If you have written a post with wrong grammar and a lot of spelling mistakes then Google will never recommend it to the users. Your post links will never be shown up in the first page of Google. In order to gain some recommendations from Google you have to provide some well understandable stuff to the readers out there. You need to recheck your content after completing it. You should always try to proofread your blog posts before publishing it.
8. Do-follow links to your blog
Links that have the highest priority in front of Search Engines are the ‘Do-follow links’. Do-follow links from authorized sites provide many benefits to the bloggers.
The benefits are:
i) More Search Traffic. (Indirectly)
ii) More Traffic from the authorized site. (Directly)
iii) More subscribers / loyal readers. (Indirectly)
iv) Helps in branding a blog. (Directly)
So you can see how beneficial the do-follow links are. To get the benefits you can do guest posting on some authorized sites. By doing this you can acquire some long lasting quality backlinks.
9. Comments on your blog
Comments on your blog play a great role in search engine ranking. They remain in the same page where you content is, and so they are not less important than your content. They also get indexed by Google and so they too contribute some part to on-page optimization. Comments like ‘nice post’ and ‘great post’ can harm your blog as they don’t add any value. No doubt, readers leaving such comments want to appreciate your work but that can also be done by sharing your post. So you can just delete those silly comments or edit them to get the SEO benefits. Learn how you can be a Hero on Blog Commenting.
10. Your Site Loading Speed
Last but not the least, your site loading speed is a big ranking factor. Search engines don’t give more attention to slow sites. Slow sites take more time in getting indexed and visitors too don’t like to open such time taking sites. I myself have experienced these things. Using a lot of plugins and widgets made my blog slow and in order to make my site load faster I downloaded my complete homepage and checked the size of each object. Finally I removed those heavy plugins, compressed the images and that helped me to improve my blog loading speed.
I hope this guide will help you in understanding the most important ranking factors that play unique roles in determining your sites reputation and the future of your blogging career. Time to say good bye but I’ll always stay in touch with you through my guest posts.
You make several good points. I always try to include some of the keywords in the comments that I leave on articles and blogs. My thinking on this is, that it helps with SEO. I also think that it helps to keep it in a conversational tone so that it encourages others to participate as well.
Thanks for your comment. Use of keywords while commenting really helps…
Very useful and informative factors for search engine rankings. Page load time is really important from search engine side as well as from visitor side. Visitors may leave slow loading site before it loads fully, as it may be frustrating and annoying. So making sure website/blog loads faster is really important. Thanks for sharing this informative and detailed post.
Thanks for dropping your comment Nizam. And yes loading speed maters a lot.
I’ve got a couple of sites and have noticed that Google seems to be using some performance metrics to help drive search rankings. Our main project is a word game solver, which tends to be “sticky” relative to my blogs. Visitors frequently pre-qualify themselves (our primary search terms are strongly linked to interest in the site – you don’t usually stumble across us by accident) and they stay for a while (since we give them something to play with. For example, we have a <a href=’http://www.hanginghyena.com/solvers/scrabble-helper’>scrabble cheat</a> page which is extremely seductive to the typical word game junkie. If you are technical, look into using AJAX on your site to make your tools interactive – done with some flair, you can draw the user into your world.
I’ve found it easier to rank “widgets” than text content (blog posts) and my stats seem to be driving it (eg. when a widget doesn’t have good metrics, we don’t rank for it). Watch your bounce rate and time on site.
will you please let me know, is one way linking is helpful after google update.
Thanks for the comment and yeah you said it right, bounce rate and time on site are very important factors.
First of all thanx for this great info. As a new bie to the blogging community I wasn’t aware of all these facts But now will definitely look upon all these factors. Thanks once again.
You are welcome Faiaz. Best wishes for your blogging journey..
It really appreciated my ways to bring traffic too.Your points are useful and i think all bloggers should follow the points as SEO is a must requiring thing to make a successful blog/site.Thanks,…for a an awesome article.
Glad you liked it. 🙂
Thanks for stopping by to comment on my article..!!
Really its very difficult to judge google ….the only thing we can do is ……simple and smartfull blogging
Yeah! you can’t judge Google. You have to do the best possible work so that they judge you as right.
The point you shared about the loading speed is really very good …but in my blog loading speed is slow because of images so m thinking of not using images in my next few article .
Ankit, you shouldn’t stop using images in your posts as they attract a lot of people; rather you should compress them before or after uploading. Use WP Smush it to compress your images after uploading or you can use Microsoft Picture Manager that comes with the Office Pack, in order to compress before uploading…!! 🙂
Thanx avi your this article is really very helpful to understand much about seo
Thanks for the appreciate..!!
you conveyed a lot of good points here avi..thanks for this tut. i really love the 10th point..optimizing a site for loading fast is what i like the most! 🙂
Glad to know that you liked my article..!! Yeah a fast loading speed can do a lot good to your blog.
great post and thank you for the guide.
The quality traffic and smart link building should be enough to have your website on right way.
thanks for sharing
hmm yeah @James..!! Targeted traffic and smart link building always works above others. Thanks for adding the info here.
You can accept 1-2 generic comments per page but a lot of such comments will really harm your blog. What if you get 100s of comments like “Good Post” & “Liked the Post“? Your blog will look like a spammy directory isn’t it? People are commenting only because they want backlinks..!!
That is really a good piece of work. I liked specially the point no:9. But how can the generic comments harm your post w.r.t SEO as those generic words are mostly ignored by Google, up to I know. So I think there should not be any harm for those comments. Please correct me if I m wrong.
Hey Thanks, I read all points but i want to know that is ranking in out of 10 or out of 100 ?
If you follow those points then it’s not at all hard to rank in top 10, provided your content is beneficial for the readers and is well optimized for the search engines.
It’s also important to remember to have unique content on both your blog and your website that is constantly being updated, in order to place well in the search engines, combined with all of the additional fantastic advice above! 🙂
Thanks @Mike. It’s very good if we create unique content for our blog and update our blog frequently as search engines and readers both like fresh content.
Quite interesting and informative post! Especially point number 7&9, both of which are something new to me. You are very right in posting quality content as the very first point as in the end all top ranked sites have only one thing in common and that is ‘quality content’. Search engines have become much smarter, which is why one should remain updated of the latest algorithms released and practice ethical SEO techniques to avoid website from loosing its ranking under serps. Tools like Google analytic prove to be of great help in building effective SEO strategies.
Content will always be the #1 priority of all the websites. Again as you said, when we use SEO techniques we should also keep updating ourselves with the latest algorithms so that our site don’t get affected in any way. Thanks for adding your informative comment here 🙂
Interesting 10 points. Must be useful for newbies.
hmm.. they will be useful for any type of site, either new or old..!!
Should we use WP Tags with posts or not?
Duplicate content inside your own site is not a big issue. So, there’s no problem if you use them; but if you can, you should stop the search engines from indexing them. This will simply reduce duplicate content problems and will help you in acquiring better ranks..
Avi Jit, thanks for the great article. It’s good to read all these tips again although I am aware of most of them. These tips will make our blog better in SEO and have more traffic generally.
I know that many bloggers knows them (and its good is they know them well). In my post I’ve not only indicated the points but also pointed some of the misconceptions that are floating here and there.
thats what called some good seo stuff
Quite a generic comment but will accept it. Thanks for appreciating my work.
I wasn’t aware about #7 point, that spelling mistakes too can hammer your rankings in Google. I think 1-2 mistakes won’t make any difference but if your whole page is filled with many spelling mistakes… then it couldn’t rank.
You’re right, 2-3 mistakes will not harm a site’s ranking but still it’s a factor that you can’t just ignore..
All tips are beneficial But the most important is fresh content and right SEO technique.
Fresh content is what everyone search for. Good content always adds more value to a site. Thanks for leaving a comment.