Google’s goal is to serve its users the most relevant answers as quickly as possible. If you wish to improve the search engine presence of your website, then you should optimize it for these 4 essential SEO elements: Content, Links, On-page optimization and User Experience. Make sure that your website is better than your competitors in just these 4 aspects and it will certainly take your search engine presence to completely new level.
With regards to content and links, both quantity and quality matter. For example, let’s suppose that a website has very few pages in it when compared with a popular competitor. Most probably this wouldn’t turn the ranking needle up and neither will it move up if it has thousands of low quality pages. The key is to maintain that essential balance and be persistent with your strategy. With regards to On-page optimization and User experience, all factors should be taken care of or else a competitor might take the advantage.
Content
A site with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis is more likely to rank higher on Google. Content can take the form of text, images, audio or video.
Quality content not just help by improving the user experience, but also gives us a chance to add keywords in our text and provides other websites a reason to link to your web pages.
Here are some important things you should keep in mind while creating content for your website:
Back-links
Back-links are links pointing from other websites to your website. A backlink consists of anchor text, link referral location and at times an attribute such as dofollow or nofollow.
Popular Search engines like Google use backlinks to discover new pages and also use them as an important ranking signal.
Links are of paramount importance when it comes to SEO. In fact one of the biggest reasons why a competitor might rank above you for a competitive keyword would most probably be back-links.
When it comes to backlinks both quality and quantity matter a lot. However quality has an edge over quantity. For example, a website with very few high quality links will certainly rank higher than website with many low quality links. Another important thing to keep in mind is that low quality links can also lead to a Google penalty, so if you are manually creating links for your website it’s always important to target at least medium quality links.
On-page optimization
Search engine like Google use sophisticated text-matching algorithms to rank web pages for relevant search queries. On-page Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of optimizing a combination of several on page elements of a webpage, in order to rank high for a set of target and related keywords.
On page elements of a webpage like keyword usage in the content, title tags, structured data etc. are integrated by search engines along with the page index and used as a very important ranking signal. The most important on page SEO elements include:
User Experience
While content, backlinks and on-page SEO elements are all very important for SEO, an often ignored aspect of SEO is user experience. Users are top priority for all major web search engines, especially so for Google, which makes user experience an important ranking signal.
User experience includes some of the factors discussed above, like Content quality, Title tag, and includes many factors not discussed in the above sections, like:
