To scale up on Google, it is necessary to understand the factors that are overall involved in ranking to the topmost position, i.e., the first page of SERPs or Google.
Since the inception of search engines, information gathering and serving the right kind of information has been the ultimate goal. SEO ranking factors are used to determine and serve these results. Google, as a search engine, heavily relies on these ranking signals to rate and assess the quality of websites. However, which factor or signal is most important is not a valid question in 2022 as Google keeps on updating its algorithms 500-600 times a year.
The reason for this is best known to Google itself. But we do need to understand that showing relevant, quality content on the web has been the top and only priority for Google. And that is the very reason it has been the widely used search engine across the world. As Of March 2022, the global market share of Google has alone been 94.1 % in India and also remained at the top in other countries as well.
If you are looking to create a website or already have one published on the internet, then you must know what it takes to rank on Google in 2022
In today’s comprehensive guide, we’ll be covering the top 10 essential SEO ranking factors in 2022. So now, let’s first understand the seo ranking factors 2022 step by step.
What Are the Most Important SEO Ranking Factors
The most important ones are divided into 3 major areas of SEO. The 3 parts of SEO are on-page, off-page, and technical seo. The term “SEO” is a short term for “search engine optimization.” It is a dedicated technique for improving rankings on Google. If you still have doubts about rankings, then all your doubts or concerns will clear once you read this beginners guide.
Important SEO Ranking Factors
The fundamentals in SEO almost remain the same. And focusing on it with some essential elements will help you uplift your rankings on SERPs.
On-Page SEO Ranking Factors
- Quality Content – Content is the heart of the internet. We are always looking for content on the internet in texts, videos, images, etc. This has been the game-changer, especially for search engines when they have to prioritize and provide the relevant source of information to the users. Being around this digital age, you must be familiar with the term “Content is king,” and according to Google, it is. Without content, no useful information can be given to the end-user.
Now, what does Google expects from content in 2022? It does expect the same what it directs it gives in its guidelines, and most of it remains the same. The focus lies in Quality, relevancy, and user intent. The best part here is not just optimizing your website with keywords but helping the visitor solve its query with the best solution. The freshness of the content is prominent in such cases as well because of the competition of search terms or keywords.
The uniqueness of the content too matters a lot, as it helps you to build your authority around that subject of interest. The amount of words used in the content, i.e., content length, is very important as well. A recent study from backlinko has proved the significant importance of content length.
2. Meta Data Optimization – Optimising the metadata is the first step after you have finished with your final keywords selection. This is done to ensure that the search terms match with the user intent on the web pages. Including the keyword in the title tag of HTML shows the web page’s relevancy as it is the element that is displayed on the SERPs. This is also one of the most vital ranking signals for Google.
Keywords in the description tag – The results displayed on Google also show a short snippet of relevant information regarding the specific websites. This helps the user know a piece of brief information about the website and what they will benefit from. And hence including your target keyword contextually in the description tag will help to get more clicks to your website. An ideal length of these tags should be under 160 characters. If, by chance, more characters are included, then Google will truncate the rest and only display in the character limit.
Still not a direct ranking factor but influences your overall rankings on search engines. Please note Google will also not use the description of what you might have specifically written it can also take any content from the site to display it on the search results pages.
3. Using keywords in the Headings – Headings and subheadings are used to arrange the content structure in an appropriate manner. It also helps the user to understand the idea behind the content in a pleasant manner. Long headings were used only to break down the content in logical ways. But it has always been a good practice in SEO for including keywords or related synonyms in your headings and subheadings.
It is now considered an important ranking signal since the recent August 26th update where “Google has now officially confirmed that an update to how it displays titles took place last week. According to Google, they have launched a new system that determines the best title for a given page using a variety of factors and HTML page elements.
Google is also no longer dynamically adjusting titles based on the user’s query. With this new system, Google will select one title, and that is the title that will be displayed, regardless of the query”. – source: Amsive Digital
4. Keywords in the content body – Making your content keywords optimised is relevancy and ranking factor on page seo. But you need to be careful in this aspect to avoid unnecessary stuffing of keywords in the content body. I can also drop your rankings and penalise you. Duplicate content should also be removed as this can impact your rankings. to avoid duplicate content issues, canonical tags can be used to reference the original source of information.
5. Image alt text and optimization – Images used on the website should be compressed in a more quality format. Because it directly affects the loading time of the site. Large file-sized images take a lot of time to render and load on the front. Recommended practice is to come up with images under 100 kb. A proper file name and alt text to the image should be included to help the user better understand the image if it fails to load. Optimizing it with keywords and also being descriptive is important. A recent study done by a search engine journal has given a verdict as a confirmed ranking signal.
6. URL optimization -Including keywords in the url can also help to rank as it gives relevant signals to google about the web page’s content.
Technical SEO Ranking Factors
The technical side of your website is crucial as it can impact or drop your rankings. Making your site technically sound can influence our rankings on SERPs.
- Sitemaps – A sitemap file is used for a better understanding of the web pages on a website, and It is important for crawlers and users to know the pages that they can view. As for crawlers, they view these to index, and users can find the pages quickly to browse. Read more here on a detailed guide to “What is XML sitemap in seo and why it matters?”
- Robots.txt file – Search engine crawlers or bots are constantly crawling the web. To ensure they don’t crawl and index some pages, say, for example, a checkout page for an ecommerce store, the admin login page of the backend(websites) etc., a simple text file is uploaded that tells them not to index these pages. There are directives such as “Allow” and “Disallow” that notifies them to allow certain crawling & indexing and vice versa.
- Structured data markup (Schema) – Delivering rich results by Google is now an essential part of the search engine results page. The structured data for the content is marked up on respective pages like blogs, articles, FAQs, recipes etc., to display rich snippets of information on Google. It influences rankings.
Off Page SEO Ranking Factors
In seo google ranking factors, off page factors play a vital and huge role in any SEO strategy . As after relevancy, the biggest factor in front of Google is credibility and popularity. All these are taken into consideration with the respect ot E-A-T i.e. Expertise, Authoritativeness and trustworthy. To know more on this click on the link – https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf
- Backlinks – the number of sites linking to your website is considered to be one of the important ranking signals to Google. As it establishes a sense of trustworthiness in the search engine landscape. A backlink is an external type of link coming from another domain or website to your own domain.
However the type of links i.e. Dofollow or nofollow does matter in linking for the purpose of link equity of link juice. Nofollow link do not pass any link value across the linkable sites, here we can drive relevant and quality traffic to the linked site. Whereas a Dofollow link passes a link value of that domain to the linkable site for the purpose of rankings. A lot of other factors are also taken into account for backlinks like type of website, its relevance to your website, domain history etc.
Conclusion
So now you might have got familiar with the top 10 essential SEO ranking factors in 2022. The idea of this blog was to understand what elements you need to start concentrating, and of course some more information may be missed from my end.Please feel free to know about this in the comments.