A long time ago, in a land far far away, was the headquarters of a company called Google. They never used to consider the popularity of other people to rank websites. They used to rely on the quality of the content and the type of backlinks that a particular website was getting.

But soon everything was about to change. Because they wanted to live an exciting life. They started integrating the social signals as part of their algorithm. And soon the websites would have a hard time ranking on page 1.

Let’s be serious now (I loved that bit of storytelling though 🙂 )

It is true that Google has backtracked on their stance about social signals directly affecting the rankings of websites. But that does not prevent the SEOs from ranking their websites with the help of social signals.

Is it possible that these social signals are indirectly affecting their rankings?

That is quite possible.

And for that reason alone, I’m writing this article. Because it is an interesting topic to research about and dig in.

You will be surprised by what I was able to find out.

Social media does have an impact on your SEO strategy. But it might not be what you think.

Let’s dive deep and check out the 6 ways that social media has an impact on SEO.

 

1. You get traffic from social media

If you have built up an audience on your Facebook page, or Twitter or any other social network. And you share high-quality links to your website or other websites, sharing relevant information that your audience loves. Then you are bound to get some traffic to your website as well.

That is valuable traffic that you are receiving. And Google can see that.

In Google’s eyes, your website seems well rounded. You don’t rely solely on search engines to receive traffic. And you produce good enough content on social media that people like to click on it and visit your website.

 

2. Social Media Profiles Do Rank in Search Engines

Love it or hate it, you have seen social media profiles rank for some of the most competitive terms out there. And if you can create an optimized social profile for a particular keyword and create backlinks for it, you will see it rank just like a normal website, if not better.

Not just that. You have also seen social profiles rank for a lot of brand name searches. Like for instance, if you searched for the keyword “Rolls Royce” in Google, you will definitely their social media profiles in the results.

Why does this happen?

Well, Google knows that you are searching for a brand name, and it wants to give you the full picture of what that brand is all about. And social media profiles are a great way to do that because they are much more personal than webpages.

That’s what a normal person would like to see.

If you’re researching about a company that you know nothing about, what would you do?

Check out their website?

Or would you go on their Instagram and Twitter to check out what kind of things they tweet/post about?

I’m assuming it’s the latter option that you’d choose because that would give you more insight about the company.

 

3. Never Say Never

Google might have backtracked on their stance about social signals, for now. But remember, that is not a permanent decision.

And as different link building strategies like guest blogging, etc. are becoming less and less reliable as a way to judge the authority of a webpage, Google will most certainly be looking for different signals to look for authority and value.

And it is possible that very soon, the social media presence of a person will come into play.

So to avoid your website falling off of page 1, it is better to start building your social authority right now. And it’s not even that hard to do. You only need to focus on some key social networks like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

You can add Pinterest if you are in the wedding niche or anything that has a lot of things that people would like to see before buying. Pinterest and Instagram are the perfect social networks for those kinds of niches.

 

4. It Is Easier to Get Links with Social Media

I know it sounds surprising. But here’s the thing, Google considers both sides of the coin when someone is linking out: the authority of the website linking out, and the authority of the website receiving that link.

So, if you are actively promoting your content through social media, and someone links to your social profile, you are indirectly receiving a link to your website, albeit in a much safer environment.

Because that link will be filtering out everything bad and will only pass on the good link juice, all thanks to that social network.

#SocialNetworksFTW

 

5. Social Media is Very Important for Local SEO

It is reported that as much as 80 percent of the people use their smartphones to find businesses near them. This means that if you are not leveraging your geography, it is possible that your competitor’s shop 2 blocks down the road is getting the customers that you should be getting.

Not just that, websites like Yelp take this to a whole new level of leveraging geography. They not only allow the businesses to list themselves in a specific geographical area, they also allow the customers to openly talk about their experience with the business.

And if you manage to have a lot of happy customers leaving a ton of positive reviews, you can start planning your vacation to Paris very soon. Because the most positive reviews you have, the higher your listing will be on these websites. And not just that, Google will see these reviews and also list your website higher as well.

I know this sounds like an endless party. And it is.

But the key here is to make sure that your geographic information like Name of the business, Address and Phone number matches across all the platforms that you have profiles on. This is very crucial because even a single misplaced comma can end up with you having a lower ranking in search engines.

 

6. Bing Is Right Behind Google

A lot of people forget about Bing. And they shouldn’t because it is the 2^nd most-used search engine in the world. And its market share has been steadily growing for the past couple of years.

So it is a better idea to optimize your website for Google as well as Bing to leverage everything that you can get.

And while Google might not be directly considering social signals as a ranking factor, Bing does.

They have clearly stated that they do look at the social authority of a user. And this social authority does influence the rankings of that website in their search engines.

What is this social authority you might ask?

Social authority is just a cool term used to define how many followers you have, and how many people you follow.

In an ideal world, if you are serious about internet marketing and SEO, you would want to have more followers than the people you follow.

But then again, everything is compared to your competitors. So it might be a good idea to see what your competitors are doing with their social media accounts.

 

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you want to have a website that is optimized for everything: Search engines and social media. This will give you the biggest edge over your competitors.

The world is getting smaller every day. People get things faster.

When Apple is launching their new iPhone, people start getting in lines days before the launch. They literally camp outside the Apple store.

Whenever there is a breaking news, you find yourself glued to your TV screen. And behind the scenes, the reporters are scrambling to deliver that fresh report to their network.

Everyone wants to be the first. And everyone wants to get there as quickly as possible. And the same thing applies to the websites that people visit and to the internet as a whole.

Don’t you just hate it whenever you see that buffering icon on YouTube?

So imagine how your visitors might feel if they have to wait even more than a millisecond for your website to load.

With the overload of information, people have no patience with websites these days. And they are right to be impatient. Because there are hundreds of other websites where they can access almost the same information as you were going to provide them.

So why not go to a website that loads much faster and overall, gives them a better user experience.

Every internet user expects any, if not all the websites they visit, to load within 2 seconds. And if the website has not finished loading within 3 seconds, they abandon the website. This is according to a study done by KISSmetrics.

But that’s not the worst thing.

If you are in the eCommerce business, you will have a harder time sustaining your business than in any other industry out there. Because almost 64% of the shoppers, that experience longer loading times usually go for an alternative website. Even if that means paying more for the same product.

So because of slow loading speeds, you might not just lose random visitors. You might actually start losing actually, loyal customers that once purchased from you.

This is mainly because when a website takes a lot of time to load, the trust on that particular website goes down. Because in this day and age, if you are a thriving business, you ought to have lightning fast page loading speed. And that’s what your visitors/customers expect.

So the trend that we’re seeing here, is not that it is okay if your website takes a couple more seconds to load because you have a ton of images on that page.

That’s unacceptable.

You just cannot have your website slow down because you have a ton of images, or maybe there are some unoptimized files on that page. You have to take care of that right now if you want to stay in business a year from now.

And on top of all of that, Google had also announced that the loading speed of your website will now be considered as a ranking factor.

So, don’t think that you are in the clear if you’re not the eCommerce industry. You will still need to optimize your website for speed.

But the good thing is, Google compares your website with your competitors. And whoever has the lowest load time, will win that competition. But don’t be a happy duck just yet if your website is very fast. Because Google also considers a couple different factors like the device, the network, the country, etc.

Now that we understand how important the loading speed of a website is, let’s jump into some of the ways through which you can improve it.

 

1. Minimizing HTTP Requests

HTTP requests are used whenever a browser wants to fetch a file from a particular web server. If this does not happen, then your website won’t load (obviously).

Yahoo conducted a study recently and found out that more than 70% of the time is taken by these HTTP requests.

On top of that, every browser is only limited to have 4-8 simultaneous connections per domain.

So if you have 30+ files that need to be fetched by the browser, then good luck with that. Might as well get some popcorn because your website is going to be loading for a while.

But this also gives us room to improve. If you have a ton of HTTP requests, you need to lower them.

How Do We Decrease the Number of HTTP Requests?

Great question. Very relevant. I love it!

There are several things that you can do to reduce the number of HTTP requests. Here are some of them:

• Use queries only to load what’s needed –

  You can use specific conditional statements to do this. Let’s say that you know that you only need to load specific images on the desktop version of your site. And you only need to load a specific number of images on the mobile version. So, instead of loading them on both, you can add conditional statements. These are scripts that take the load off the browser and will also improve your website’s loading speed.

• Combine CSS and JS files –

  If you have a ton of CSS or Javascript files that are being loaded on a page. Rather than keeping them separate, you can combine them. This will prevent the browser from using a separate connection to load a specific CSS/JS file. Instead, it will be able to load them together. But this can also be a challenging thing for you if your website varies from page to page.

• Reduce how many images you use –

  I’ll put it this way. Only use images if you think that they will improve the overall user experience of your visitor. If you find some images that are heavy, then it probably a good idea to get rid of them. If not, you can try some image size reduction websites or plugins. WP Smush is a well-known plugin that does that.

 

2. Start Using CDNs and Get Rid of Unused Scripts

It is very possible that most of the visitors coming to your website will not be in a close proximity to your web server. And the greater this distance is, the more time it will take for the web server to transfer information.

So, it makes sense if you were to spread out your content across a huge number of servers throughout the globe. But that will be a bit too complicated for people like you and me.

That’s where these CDN, aka, Content Delivery Network companies come into the picture. These companies own a ton of web servers across the globe. Once the files of your website are uploaded to their servers, they can then take advantage of the location to load your website quicker.

A ton of businesses just use a CDN provider like EdgeCast or some other provider to get this done for them. This reduces the headache that they would have to go through by owning all those servers.

Other smaller businesses might even think that having a CDN is unnecessary or maybe out of their budget. So they choose to go for resourcefulness to get the same quick loading effect. Websites such as CNDjs can help you with that.

They have a library of CSS and JS files that you can utilize and not host on your own servers. This will reduce your load time.

 

3. Use Browser Caching

This is a nifty little trick that everyone should use. Through browser caching some of the files of your website can be downloaded to the hard drive of your visitor in a cache. A cache is a temporary storage space.

Once these files are downloaded in the cache, it drastically reduces the load times of your website. Because essentially it can just pull all the files from its cache instead of downloading them each and every time.

The best part about this is that whenever the visitors visit your website, if the first page loads quickly enough, certain files of your website can be downloaded into their cache. And if they decide to check out the other sections of your website, they will experience even faster load times.

But there is a catch to this amazing method.

All CSS, JS, images and media files that are being cached on the visitor’s computer must comply with the expiration times of the RFC. Ideally, people prefer to have the expiration of one year because anything more than that will violate the guidelines. So basically, you can choose something between a week and a year.

If you are interested in learning more about enabling browser cache and improving the page load speed of your website, you check out this article.

 

4. Compressing Images and Files

If you didn’t realize it already, your images take up 60% of the average bytes that are loaded per page, if not more. And it makes sense that images take up a huge amount of HTTP requests to load.

And as I mentioned earlier. If you want to have faster load times, you want to lower your HTTP requests. If you find any images that do not fit the context of your content, get rid of it.

If it does not improve the user experience, get rid of it.

This also includes icons.

Now that you have gotten rid of all of the unnecessary images. Now it’s time to take a look at the images that you have left. You want to make them as light as possible. Because majority of the people that use images, they directly download these images from the stock photo websites and upload them without even thinking about reducing the size of those images.

Let’s be honest, even you have never thought about making your images “lighter” until you started reading this article and realized how important it was to have your website load faster.

Assuming that you have a lot of large images, you want to run them through different image optimization software like Compressio.io or the Image Optimizer. It depends on which one you prefer. Just choose one and go with it.

How small should be the size of your images?

A good rule of thumb is to have them below 150KB for all the images that are at or below 1920px in width. This means that you will get the 72dpi quality which will be more than enough quality for these images to look good on most devices.

If the images go above 150KB, they will take more time to load and will also eat into the page rendering time as well. Not only that, large images also make the response times a lot slower. So your visitor might think that your website is broken. But in reality, you might just have a large image messing it all up.

So what file extensions you should use for your images?

Here’s a list of the file extensions that you should use:

• SVG for vector images. Because you want to see more detail in vector images.
• PNG for the images in which you want a transparent background.
• JPG for the rest of the images. These will be the images where you don’t have to focus on the fine detail.

Here’s the reality, images will still take up majority of the HTTP requests. But if you optimize them and reduce the number of images you use, along with optimizing the other aspects of your website, you can improve the overall page load speed of your website.

What will happen to those children in the Series of Unfortunate Events? What’s exactly there in Area 51? Why aren’t you still able to teleport?

There are so many mysteries to be solved.

What does it take to rank higher in Google? What are the different factors that it considers while deciding which website to rank first?

These are some of the greatest questions of the modern era. And the SEO-industry.

But all joking aside, it is really puzzling to see so many people still guessing what works and what doesn’t. And kudos to Google for still keeping things so mysterious. It’s really hard to keep something a secret for almost 20 years now.

Or must I say, they did a good job. But now the secret is out. Because I have tested these factors on several clients in different niches, even on my own websites. And the results were consistent.

Unlike other so-called “SEO-blogs” here at Website Rescue, we actually test things for ourselves before writing about it. That gives us important data that we can leverage and dominate our competition.

But the worst part is yet to come ladies and gents.

If you are not already on page 1 of Google, then you are losing a ton of sales to your competitors. Research has shown that almost 97 percent of the people NEVER click past the first page of results.

I bet even you don’t remember the last time you clicked past the first page. Unless you were doing some research for your university where you desperately needed some unique information for your thesis.

Then congratulations. You come in the 3% of the people who clicked past the first page.

Almost every business is now trying to get their website on the first page. Ideally, most of them would love to be in the top 3 spots of the organic listings. But that ain’t a child’s play.

And all of that desire has now led you to this very article where you will uncover the most important ranking factors that affect your rankings in Google.

But before we dive into the factors, we first need to know how Google works. Only then we will be able to truly understand why it needs those factors to rank your website on page 1.

 

How Does Google Work?

Let’s just say that over the years Google has improved a lot. And it’s not as easy to rank a website as it was in 2005.

At this point in time, Google takes almost 200 factors into consideration before deciding which website to rank where.

And if you thought that was amazing, wait till you learn this.

The algorithm is constantly changing, adapting and is smart. It uses all the data available out there to adapt in order to give the users the best experience. This also prevents some black hat SEO tactics that people use to manipulate the searches.

Quite honestly, you should stay away from those tactics because they are very temporary. And I’m assuming that you would want something that would keep your website ranked on page 1 for years to come.

So, why does Google does all that hard work just for a single search?

That’s a good question.

The reason it does that is because a search term can easily have a ton of different meanings. Let’s say that you search for the word “best restaurants,” Google does not know what you are really looking for. There are some of the possible results:

• Finding the nearest restaurant
• Fast food restaurants
• Chinese restaurants
• 5-star restaurants
• Brand new restaurants
• Multi-cuisine restaurants

By considering over 200 factors, what Google is doing, is trying to figure out what your intent is behind that particular search. And over time as you keep using Google, the algorithms will have identified and adapted to your types of searches. This lets it know our intent behind your searches.

These intents are basically divided into 4 sections:

1. Know queries: The query where the user wants more information about something. Ex: “Why do people love In & Out?”
2. Do queries: The query where the user wants to know about the subject and is ready to take action. Ex: “Best Italian restaurants in Downtown Manhattan.”
3. Website queries: The query where the user wants to go to a particular website. Ex: “Netflix”
4. Visit-in-person queries: The query where the user wants to locate a particular address and visit it. Ex: “Best dentist in San Jose.”

When a user is searching from a smartphone, then the algorithm adapts and produces data based on the intent where the user might need to go, do buy or know.

But this smart search algorithm goes beyond that. It also uses your historical data and combines that with the ranking factors that it considers in order to provide you with the best results possible.

And now that you have this information. It will help you tailor your SEO strategy and seeking out the intent of the people searching for a particular keyword.

You can then create content based on their intent.

Let’s say that I search for “electricians,” and in the top results, I see the different electricians in my local area. This means that Google has learned my intent for searching that. Its understanding is that I’m searching for an “electrician that can fix an issue for me.”

I see a ton of SEOs that rarely think about the intent of the searcher. That is the reason why their content is so disconnected from what people actually are searching for.

In Total, How Many Ranking Factors Are There?

SEOs have been testing different factors ever since they realized that they could make money by just ranking websites. After years and years of testing, they have now arrived at 200 different factors that Google’s algorithm uses to rank websites.

Now you must know that every factor holds different weight. And in this article, I am only going to list the factors that I know for a fact that they hold the most weight.

 

Most Important Google Ranking Factors Every Beginner Should Know in 2018

Below are some of the major factors that I believe will predict where your website will rank in the search engines. All these factors are based on the latest Google’s algorithm update in 2018.

 

1. Title tag should have your keyword.

The title tag is one of the first things that lets Google know what your website is about. I even talked about it in my previous blog post about why it could be one of the reasons why your website isn’t ranking anywhere in Google.

Yes, it is THAT important to have your keyword in your title tag.

The best way to take advantage of this tag is to try to have your keyword at the start of the title tag. Pages that have their keyword closer to the beginning of the title tag are ranked higher compared to the pages that have their keyword toward the end of the tag.

 

2. Having keyword in the meta description tag.

It is important to have your keyword in the meta description because at the end of the day if people don’t click on your website, there’s no use ranking on page 1. I agree that it doesn’t hold as much value as it used to, but you still want people to visit your website. So it’s better to optimize your meta description so that you gain visitors from all the hard work you are doing.

 

3. Keyword in the H1 tag

It doesn’t matter what people might say in these SEO forums. It is always a good practice to include your keyword in the H1 tag. This lets Google know that your blog post is structured around that topic and you are explaining things in detail and in different sections.

 

4. The length of the content.

Gone were the days when you could just write a 500-word article covering the basic details about the topic. And that would suffice to rank on page 1. But that is not the case now.

In fact, searchers want more information these days. They want to know everything that is there to learn about the subject they are searching for.

So it makes sense to have longer content because that increases the chance of you covering more topics and in-depth. So, if you are writing that next blog post on your website, don’t shy away from writing a 3,000-word post that covers everything about that topic.

 

5. Avoid duplicate content at all costs

If you are putting all this time and effort on your website and trying to get it ranked on page 1, you might as well invest in unique content on your website. Having duplicate content negatively affects your rankings.

So, make sure that you do have duplicate content on any of your pages.

Better to be safe than sorry.

 

6. Use Canonical tags

If you have a bigger website, it makes sense that there might be times when you would have to write content that is similar to something that you have written in the past.

In those cases, Canonical tags help you tell Google that both URLs are equivalent and that even though they are 2 separate pages on your website, they should be considered as one.

 

7. Image optimization

I see this countless of times. People invest so much in their content. They literally have 5,000-word blog posts on their website but they forget to optimize their images.

Remember, Google cannot see. You have to describe the image in text so that Google knows what it is about and how it is relevant to the article.

You can use the alt text, caption and the description of the images to achieve that.

 

8. Fresh content

Google loves fresh content. And it is better if you incorporate a content marketing strategy along with your SEO strategy. This will help you rank for even more keywords over time.

And if you have commercial pages such as product pages, then Google recognizes that and so they don’t need to be constantly updated.

 

9. Outbound links

Having outbound links to authoritative websites will tell Google that you want the user to learn more about the subject from trusted sources. And believe me, this is a huge trust factor.

I have literally seen websites jump from mid page 3 to top of page 2 just by using this factor.

But the key is to use this in moderation. Because having too many outbound links will diminish the value of your website.

 

10. Internal links

Having internal links is just as important as having outbound links. These links will help the user easily navigate through your website and learn more about the topic that they are interested in.

And anything that can improve the user experience is a ranking factor that Google considers.

 

So, if you just optimize for these 10 SEO factors, you will see your website jump rankings in no time.

Remember the 80/20 rule (Pareto’s Principle). You always get 80% of the results from 20% of the effort you put in. But that 20% is the most important percentage that gets the job done. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to achieve your goals. In this case, page 1 rankings.