5 Little Known SEO Factors That Could Affect Your Rankings

Ranking on the first page of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing isn’t a matter of luck. You need to know the key factors that significantly effect your website rankings. Otherwise, you can bet your site won’t make it to the first page any time soon!

New to SEO? Do you just want to know the most important SEO factors so that you can start focusing your efforts on them, starting today? Then our 5 little-known SEO factors is a good way for you to learn all the essentials without wasting a lot of time, energy, and money. After you’ve read this it would be a good idea to read our Beginners Guide to SEO and Advanced On-Page SEO Guide.

Remember that this list was based on the findings of survey results and correlation data from the Moz 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Here are 5 little-known SEO factors that could affect your rankings:

1. Fresh or Regular Content

Google rewards website that publish “fresh” and regular content. Without regular quality content and website optimisation, your website could suffer from low SEO rankings. You could argue your website is like a human being: it requires a healthy dose of nutrients intake (quality content) and regular exercise (website optimisation) so that it doesn’t become unhealthy and have poor rankings!

2. Good User Experience

Good user experience is key to rising higher in search engine rankings. Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing are consistently looking for site that offers good user experience to its users, and penalize the bad ones.

So, if your website has a high bounce rate, very low time on site, and only few pages per visits, that is an indication of poor user experience. If this is the case, then you might want to redesign your website, create better navigation, and offer more quality content on a regular basis.

3. Author’s Reputation

It’s still not 100% clear that an author’s reputation will have any positive effect on search engine rankings, but most SEOs agree that this concept will be more valuable in the future. So, it would not hurt to start building your personal brand and that of everyone else who are involved with you on your site or blog.

Collaborating with expert guest bloggers is also a great start for your site.

4. Page Authority

Page Authority is a metric of how well a given web page on your site will rank in Google’s search engine results. The authority or strength of a page depends on several different factors, including inbound link counts, page rank, trust, and dozens of other things. So, in order to increase your page authority, you may have to improve your overall SEO, especially by getting quality backlinks from high authority sites.

5. Keywords

On-page optimisation is still very important. Your website’s page and posts still needs keywords in the titles, meta descriptions, headers, body text, and anchor texts to make the content highly relevant to keyword searches. Including several instances of the same keywords are also helpful, but only if they don’t appear spammy and over-the-top. If you can maintain an organic (natural) keyword distribution throughout your pages and posts, it could affect your rankings positively.

6. Bonus: Social signals

Social sites such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter has become the most popular place to hang on the Internet for many Internet users, including your potential customers. Although it’s 100% proven if it will also help your site to achieve higher rankings, nonetheless, having an active social profiles with regular fresh posts will surely bring a lot of traffic to your website.

Conclusion

If you’re not getting the results – higher rankings, more targeted traffic, and better conversions – then you may want to rethink your online marketing strategy. In our “5 SEO Mistakes You Don’t Know You are Making” article, you’ll find out commonly made mistakes that most small business owners fall victim to, and take proper action to avoid them happening in the future.

By Josh Hamit @hamit