Google can be fairly tight-lipped on how exactly their web crawlers’ algorithm works. Most of what we know about their ranking practices is either very obvious or down to studied observation of ranking fluctuations in relations to changes on a specific web page.
Most webmasters know all the big SEO activities: content, link profiles, link architecture, crawlability, keywords research, URL structure. But a lot of the lesser known, but still important, ways to improve website ranking, are often ignored. We explore some below.
Domain Age
This is one of those things you can’t really change as a webmaster. But it should give you some hope that as your website occupies the internet longer it will slowly gain reputation.
I’m not seriously recommending just sitting around and waiting for your rank to go up, just that you can expect the increase in website ranking to be more noticeable with time.
Hosting
Sometimes it’s not about the state of your website but rather that of your website hosting service. This is similar to bad-neighbourhood link. The best option is to host your own website with a dedicated IP, but that’s not financially viable for smaller websites.
Use hosting services that are in your country and always investigate the reputation of your hosting service and the websites which they host.
Bounce Rate
So, people find your domain on the web results, click on it, see the first page, leave and continue their search. Obviously this doesn’t look very good for your website. Search engines may begin to think you’re a spam site because no one explores your content.
If you want your rank increased, entice visitors to venture past the homepage by communicating your message clearly and making navigation of the site simple.
Trust
It’s one of the most important but hard to define ranking factors that Google has. It’s almost like your relationship with Google. The feeling it’s gotten about your site since first meeting you (indexing your page).
Have you ever been found using black-hat SEO? How well known are you around web communities? How stable have yours ranks been? It’s a hard thing to earn but once your Trust Rank is high, search engine optimization efforts will see a lot more results.
Usability & Speed
Search engine web crawlers will measure the time taken to browse your site and penalise pages that go over a certain loading time. This factor though, is quite easy to check.
Website ranking tools can be used to determine the usability on your page but it’s often more of an intuitive thing. Approach your site as new visitor trying to find a specific service and see if your site makes sense.
Social Signals
It’s not that big yet but Google reports that social signals will only gain more weight as their ability to index content on social media websites becomes more sophisticated.
It would be a smart investment to start working on an effective social media campaign to gain a reputation in this area.