A lot of SEOs have done experiments and research to figure out what the top-ranking factors are. Take Brian Dean as an example and his 200 Google Ranking Factors on Backlinko. These articles and studies are educational, but they don’t really reveal what you need to do on your website every day to make sure that you have a healthy website. The real ranking factors are found in Google Search Essentials, a guide for webmasters on how to make sure that their website ranks.
Google Search Essential breaks out some of its requirements in the very first section. There are three things to keep in mind:
- Technical requirements
- Spam policies
- Best practices.
This guide will break out those sections in a whole fresh perspective. We will also paint out how to get your site ranked in Google and explain how search works.
Technical Requirements for Google Organic Search
The technical requirements aren’t so hard to understand. There are really three different requirements:
- Google must be able to access your site.
- The page must work.
- The content must be a type that can be indexed by Google.
How do you let Google crawl your website? It’s quite easy. In fact, you don’t have to do anything. If you do nothing, Google will eventually crawl your website. Most platforms like Wix, Shopify, etc. already are set up to let Google crawl your website. If you have built your website from scratch, use a more complicated platform like WordPress, etc., you will need to check to make sure that Google can crawl your website.
- Your robots.txt file should not disallow Googlebot from crawling your website.
- You should not have tags on your pages that discourage indexing (noindex, nofollow).
- If you have WordPress, you should go to the “reading” section and make sure that Google can crawl the site.
Another thing that is explained in the technical requirements is that the page must return a 200 code. The page must work, and the page must also have a good user experience. Google is not going to index every page on your website. For example, Google my choose not to index a blog category page. But for your main pages, it will likely index most of them if they have good content.
Spam policies are another important thing to keep in mind. Most websites will never get a serious Google manual penalty. Here are some things to keep in mind with Google’s spam policy:
- Don’t create a “fake page” for indexing and then direct people to other content from that page This is called cloaking.
- Don’t have doorway pages, which are pages designed to rank a specific page on your website for a specific search query that ends in a destination on your site that is not helpful.
- Don’t buy an expired domain and turn it into something else (like taking a sports knowledge website and turn it into a betting website).
- Don’t let your site get hacked. Sometimes, hackers will damage your website to manipulate search engine rankings. WordPress is the most common place that this can happen.
- Don’t hide text on your website (like turning text white to hide it against a white background to manipulate keyword rankings). You can use accordions, sliders, and other design elements that cycle between content.
- There are other things that can hurt your rankings, like putting personal information on a website, scams, and other types of things.
Just run your website legally and ethically and your website will rank.
Crawling and Indexing: The Important Information You Need To Know To Get Your Website Indexed
This is the important part. Following this checklist exactly will let Google crawl your website. Keep in mind that most website platforms already have this set up for you. However, it is helpful to understand it so that you know what is going on:
File types that are indexable by Google refers to the specific types of things that Google can read. React is a good example of a platform that is not easily crawlable by Google. It’s a coding platform that is designed to make websites fast. However, without some additional programming, Google cannot crawl it because it does not render crawlable content without an attribute called “helmet.” Here are the types of files that Google can craw:
- PDFs
- Microsoft Office documents that are stored on your crawlable server.
- HTML
- Text files
- Programming files, such as Python source code.
- ANYTHING that is text.
Google loves text. It also loves certain types of media files, including audio, video, and images. If you use JPEG or PNG files, Google can crawl these. Google can also crawl WEBP files. If you have an AVIF image, Google will not be able to process it for search.
Here are some other factors to keep in mind when setting up your website:
- Make sure that your URLS are human friendly and do not use underscores or bunch words together. Let’s say that you have a page on your website about basketball shorts. The URL should look something like this: /basketball-shorts. Don’t put numbers or other characters into your URLs. There are some exceptions to these rules for sites in languages that use other characters, but you will probably never have to worry about this.
- Links are important for Google. Make sure that you put anchor text on your links that are descriptive and meaningful. Don’t use text like “click here” or leave the link bare without anchor text. Also, only use links to aid in user navigation when someone is reading content. Don’t put a whole bunch of links next to each other in a sentence.
- Use link attributes. If you externally link to content you trust, use follow. If you want to reference another website, but don’t want to pass your link equity, use the nofollow attribute. Let’s say that you have a website that is a business directory; you might want to use the sponsored attribute if someone paid you for the link. For user- generated content, consider using the ugc attribute. For user-generated content a sponsored links, using the nofllow attribute is just as good.
- Do you need a sitemap? In most situations, a sitemap is recommended for sites with more than several URLs. Most platforms now automatically generate a sitemap for you.
- Canonicalization is a technique that helps Google show the most important URLs from a group of similar pages. Most of the time, you will never need to worry about canonicals as the platform you are using might create these for you.
Link Building and Your Website
It’s interesting to point out that Google’s Search Essentials doesn’t mention backlinks, except in the spam area of essentials. Backlinks are still included in search console, which is interesting. After surveying some websites, here are a few things that we noticed:
- Pinterest is a really good backlinks to have.
- Guest blogs are important.
- Forum backlinks are pretty much garbage.
- Older backlinks that come from guest blogs may still exist, but as they age, unless they are a good link, might not count towards your search engine ranking.
Google does say that links to your website ARE important in the search essentials. If your website is not indexing well, it may be hard to get your site indexed. Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s hard to rank a website without backlinks. It’s still hard to rank a site with backlinks.
How to Create Content
Google does a pretty good job of telling us how to create content. Let’s look at some of the insights that we can glean from the Google Search Essentials guide:
- Write content that is useful to a user’s search on Google.
- Make sure that the main headline and title of the page are relevant to the query that you are trying to target.
- You can use AI content. But it should be content that is written for humans. There is a difference between having ChatGPT write an article and using an AI platform that lets you add relevant stats and facts to the article. If you humanize the content to a certain extent and tell the AI how to structure the article, this is still human-first content.
- Many SEOs advocate that content length is important. However, if your content answers the query, write naturally until you feel you have written everything possible about the subject.
There are other elements to keep in mind when structuring your content:
- Use a good title tag on the page. Keyword placement in the title tag is important. You might also want to use the full space allowed (60 characters). On your homepage, you want to use a title tag that has a slight CTA in it. Let’s say that you are a dental implant clinic. You might want to use a title like this: Dental Implants – Kalamazoo | Over 100k New Smiles. On your services page and blog pages, frontload the keyword and include your brand and location.
- The H1 is the title of the page and should be somewhat keyword centric. If it’s a services page, the name of the service will suffice. Blog post H1s are the title of the blog. H2s and H3s break up the page in a meaningful manner.
- For longer content, Google MIGHT show the h2 and the first sentence of the section in place of the meta description and SEO title tag. So, use keyword placement here strategically.
Hopefully, this guide has given you some useful information from the essentials of Google Search, to help you understand the most important ranking factors. They are:
- Is your site usable and do your pages work?
- Have you created useful content?
- You have a website that is designed for people.
By having a well-functioning website, you are going to easily rank and get traffic to your website.