When you get down to it, every website ever launched has the same goal: to draw traffic and achieve a high ranking on major search engines. But even as SEO tactics and challenges become more and more refined, the basic factors that determine a website’s success remain mostly unchanged. And although Google lists around 200 factors that they officially take into consideration, all of them can in fact be grouped up into four major categories that you need to pay special attention to:On-Page Factors:The way your page is built is the single most important factor affecting your rankings. Everything from the keywords you use in your title tag and meta description tag to the length and quality of your content can have an effect on how Google and other search engines view your website. Make sure to use internal links between the pages of your site and always include keywords in the URL slug of each subpage.Site Factors:Certain site-wide factors also have a big influence on your search engine ranking. For instance, the location of the server where your website is housed helps boost your rankings for that particular region of the world, while having a good sitemap can aid Google in indexing your website’s pages and increase your search visibility as a result. Make sure you also optimize your site for mobile trafficking, as Google has increasingly made it a point to penalize websites that fall behind in this regard.Off-Page Factors:Aside from the website proper, Google also looks at external factors when calculating your ranking. The most important ones refer to the number of linking pages and linking domains that lead to your site, but the domain authority of the linking page is also taken into consideration. What’s more, link relevancy matters too, since Google grants more relevancy to pages that are related to your own website’s topics. In this regard, contextual links are said to be more valuable thank links in a sidebar.Domain Factors:Finally, your chosen domain also has a strong impact on your overall rankings. While some of the domain signals have decreased in strength over the past few years, you should still pay attention to things like domain history and registration length. As far as the latter factor is concerned, Google has stated that it considers domains that have been registered for longer than a year as more trustworthy. It can also be important to have a country-specific TLD extension if you want to achieve better rankings in that particular location.As you can see, the seemingly complicated nature of determining Google rankings can be simplified if you just group every factor according to its main category. Of course, this still means that getting to the top can take a lot of work. Luckily, there are professionals that can handle the job, like the Toronto SEO company Seologist.com or other agencies offering digital marketing services in Toronto. Only by employing the best in the business will you stand a chance of getting a foothold in the competitive online world and carving out a prosperous niche for you and your website.
