Five Search Ranking Factors Ignored by Most Marketers and Advertisers
Businesses, irrespective of size are investing heavily in online marketing campaigns to get their brand name to be remembered by their target audiences. For fulfilling their objectives, they seek help from an SEO and social marketing experts who use their knowledge gained from their experience to develop appropriate solutions. Also, there are many SEO guides and “How-to” blog posts on the web which provide information related to search and social marketing. But many experts say that many of these resources consist of incorrect or outdated information or advice.
Most of the SEO blog sites forget about optimization factors that determine the ranking of websites in search engine results. As Google and other search engines make changes in their Webmaster guidelines every year, marketers and advertisers have to update their SEO knowledge and skills so that they won’t face the wrath of Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates. Here are the five search ranking factors that many people simply ignore or forget to implement in their search marketing campaign.
Click-Through-Rate Optimization
To get targeted search traffic to click-through your website, you can write descriptions related to the search query. A good description provides a solution related to the search that was conducted to display your webpage in the search engine results. For instance, if a user is performing a search for point-and-shoot cameras by entering a search query “buy a point and shoot camera” you have to write a description that mention that you have the largest selection and lowest prices on different point-and-shoot cameras. Even though descriptions have zero SEO value, they hold a lot of weight in terms of CTR.
Readable Headings and Subheadings
When it comes to articles and blogs, you must have headings and subheadings in order to break up your text and make it easier to scan through while retaining the main point. This because the majority of your site visitors is not going to read your content completely, but they just scan through it and if you have non-stop paragraphs with no headings or subheadings then they won’t get any information useful to them. Google and Bing give importance to your H1 and H2 tags, so it’s a good idea to make your critical information into headings. Keep in mind that you write content for your reader while also keeping SEO strategies in the back of your mind.
Keyword Stuffing is Not Good
When SEO was in the infant stage, keyword stuffing and giving importance to keyword density was popular and lots of websites, jammed their content with keywords with the hopes of getting high search rankings. But today, search engines are totally against these tactics and are considered as “black-hat SEO” tactics. To avoid penalization by Google or any other search it is advised that you conduct a content audit that includes blog posts written several years ago. You need to weed out low quality content irrelevant keyword phrases that will surely attract penalty actions from Google.
External Links included in Authority Sources
We all know that search engines know your content is of high quality when you provides relevant links out to high quality and reputed sites. It is said to be a good tactic to link out to at least one top site in each piece of content on your website. You need to remember it when you write blog posts and articles. If you allow guest posting on your site, then you need to eliminate all the unnecessary outbound links and ensure all external links are pointing to relevant and high quality websites. Penalty action will impose on those websites that has outbound links to several sites that no longer live and to some spammy sites.
Having a Social Presence is Necessary
Nowadays, brands cannot think about marketing and advertising without the social media as it is the perfect platform for them to interact and engage with their target audience. Many marketing and advertising experts recommend their clients make better presence in social media sites especially on Facebook and Twitter. Even though many businesses have their social profiles on Facebook and Twitter, they aren’t using them and some of them didn’t link to their websites. As social media sites as high active user traffic, you need to make more than just a social presence. Here you have to come up with some strategies so that your target audience will follow you regularly and will convert in the near future.
There are other search rank determining factors that people ignore, but above five are the most important factors to mention. With help from SEO professionals, you can devise a search marketing strategy based your business requirements that will ensure 100% success rate.