SEO and Google Ranking Criteria

It is becoming increasingly necessary for management of various organizations and SMEs to understand the dynamics of the Internet and Search Engine, and how to use these powerful tools to enhance their operations, and by so doing, increase traffic to their websites and maximize return on investment (ROI), which ensures they enjoy all the benefits despite the stiff competition that exist on the Internet. 

By ensuring you understand the needs of your customers, it becomes easier for business owners to market the right produces and equally provide the right content on their websites. Online sales is driven by the kind of offers provided by companies on their websites, such as offering a variety of products for customers to choose from as well as the ease of payment. All of these help to boost traffic to a website.

Website visibility is a very important ranking criteria by Search Engines. On average, we have about 6.5 billion Google searches every day, according to a recent Worldometer report. To enjoy the benefits of this humongous online market place, many companies spend huge amount of money developing websites just to promote their brands and increase sales of their products and services. There currently over 4.5 billion people who access the Internet daily. Out of this number, 2 billion mobile phone users connect to the Internet only through their device out of a total of about 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide.

Smart devices have become an important means throughout which many people search for product and services. Website accessibility is still poses some difficulties for smartphone users, especially in disadvantaged regions of the world, such as Africa and parts of Asia. This highlights the need for a mobile-first strategy. 

People look for local information across different devices, including smartphones, so it's crucial for businesses to ensure that their websites are suitably optimized for mobile devices [consumerbarometer]. There are lots of suggestions available online on how to improve the quality visibility of your website by search engines. Below are some key criteria that could help optimize website visibility, and they include the following:

Website Traffic:
Led generation helps to increase website visibility and this it is a very important criteria in Google ranking. Websites that attract a higher number of visits are rated higher on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) than sites with lower traffic. Google crawler also use data from Google Chrome to determine traffic to a site.

Download Speed:
Browsers use download speed as a criterion for ranking a site. Search engine effectively use spiders to estimate the speed of a site based on the content of a webpage. Images play a crucial role in search engine optimization. The quality and size of an image could slow or fasten the browser when loading a site.

Website Age:
Websites with fresh content or older web pages that are updated regularly, stand a better chance in Google ranking than webpages that are older. In ranking websites, Google crawlers place more importance on domains with expiration dates that are farther. Also, domains that have several years’ subscription perform exceeding on Google search list than domains with one year or shorter subscription periods.

Regular Site Update:
The content of your webpage is the most important consideration by search engines. Regular update of websites with fresh content or updates with major changes is a good way to keep Google crawlers visiting your site, and that also help to increase site ranking. Broken links affect your site negatively and it sends a bad signal to visitors, creating the impression that the site is of low quality, has either been neglected or not well managed. Therefore, it negatively impacts the ranking of the site.

Keywords:
Keywords play a crucial role in search engine optimization. There are several ways use keywords could help your site visibility. Using keyword as part of your subdomain name can significantly improve the Google ranking of the site. When a domain name begins with a target keyword, it gives the site more visibility than placing it anywhere else within the domain name. Title tags are another very important element of a webpage. Title tag that contains a keyword makes it even more relevant.

Social Media Engagement:
Social media engagement such as the number of Likes, Shares and Comments contribute tremendously to Google ranking of websites. The strength of your social media account also plays a key a significant role. The more followers you have, the better your chances of higher ranking.

Conclusion

For a website to continue to enjoy favourable ranking on Google Search Engine Result Pages, website administrators and webmasters must ensure that they comply with these and other criteria that helps to increase traffic to their website and as well enjoy favourable placement on SERPs.