7 SEO Ranking Factors which No One Should Avoid!

As I always say that there are close to a few hundreds and thousands of ranking factors which Google consider these days for SEO purposes of a website. Read on this blog post of mine on these 7 SEO ranking factors which no one should avoid.

I guess I already discussed about 10 major ranking factors for the SEO of your website in this blog. I am sure that many of my readers are already aware that some of the most important SEO ranking factors are Meta Tags (especially Title and Meta Description which can increase your CTR), URL structures, Navigations, Headings and Sub-headings, Header Tags, Bounce Rate, Site Loading Time, Quality Content, Writing for your Readers as I said in this post, etc.

These SEO ranking factors are quite known to most of the website owners and bloggers. This is the reason why I do talked about them in many blog posts of mine in past. In this blog post we will discuss about some less known ranking factors which are still so important for the SEO performance of our website and we do ignore them because of our ignorance.

7 SEO Ranking Factors which No One Should Avoid!

Let us discuss about the 7 SEO ranking factors which are less talked about:

Linking to Authoritative Sites

This is something which is controversial as well. This is because Google itself has created confusion about it. Google says that try not to give links to external sites from your website or blog, but on the other hand it also emphasizes on linking to high quality sites from your site.

This is the reason why many website owners prefer not to give any external link on their website.

Let me tell you that linking to other high quality websites, which are relevant to your content and should have an authority, is considered as a very positive ranking factor by Google. It is like providing useful information to your readers, and Google loves it.

It is always better to add at least one link from your blog or website to a high quality websites like Wikipedia, or Wikihow, etc.

Now this is something which can be argued by the fact that Google penalized some sites which were allowing guest blogging on their site. It is also true that they penalized many websites or blog during recent time for publishing guest blogs on their site.

Let me clear you that those website which faced such penalties were not because they were linking to some external sites, but those were a few which were charging for guest blogging or were a few which was allowing any site to get a link from those guest blog.

If you too are allowing dofollow links from your site’s guest blog, then always do give consideration towards the external links. Make some guidelines about them, as I normally don’t allow more than one relevant links from guest blogs, those too from the author bio section. And always do check the quality of the landing URL and site.

Interlinking

Don’t know why webmasters fear so much about links. Most of the webmasters even stay away from interlinking their own pages on their own website or blog.

Google has never mentioned that linking to your own content is bad. Honestly interlinking gives the SEO benefits to your website, increases user engagement on your website and also helps in reducing the bounce rate of your website. These all are so crucial for getting visitors and ranking on search engines.

It is also a way through which you pass the power and authority of your websites old pages to the newly created pages of your website.

Use Social Media

Social media though not play very huge role in direct SEO of your website, but its importance in today’s world cannot be ignored. I don’t know why but some businesses and websites still ignore using sites like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

To be very frank I must say that social media presence is quite common these days. You won’t find a single person who is not using any of these websites. Either a person is either active on FB, or on Twitter, otherwise they might have an active account at Instagram. But yes I do understand that not many people are active on Google+, as it not that much popular amongst normal internet users, who are forcefully asked to create a profile on G+ by Google.

This is the reason why I don’t focus much on Google+ network. I usually spend maximum time on Twitter and then the second one is Facebook. At third place if any social media websites come to me it is the Pinterest one.

Most of the websites are still not using the social media sites for their own benefits. Many people have this misconception about using these sites that they will have to pay them for getting good results through these social media sites. It is actually not true.

If you are running a website, then you must need to present on these social networking websites and make it convenient to your users to use them from your website. Who knows a visitor of your website has 1M followers on Twitter and he shared your content over there. You can simply imagine the outcome 🙂

Content Frequency

How frequently your website is being updated? Does your website is having fresh content?

These are some of the most important criteria’s used by Google to rank a website. If you are not posting content on your website regularly, then start doing so. Try to publish frequent content on your website.

It is normally not true that if your websites will have more pages then it will have more scope to rank in search engines, but it is true that more posts and content on your site will give more options to your websites visitors to explore. Thus with time your website will become an authority website as you will post frequent content on it. This is the reason why blogs are so popular these days. You can also read this blog on how to become an authority blogger?

Promote Comments

A few months back I posted a post on responding to blog comments is good or not? The reason why I shared that post was that I wanted to let my readers know the importance of comments on our blog and websites. From SEO point of view, it generates user generated content and Google loves it.

This is the reason why I always say that ask questions to your readers and try to interact with them. Try to encourage comments on your website, it is a ranking factor which normally website owners are either not aware of or simply ignores. They ignore this because of the amount of spam comments, but you can moderate them quite easily.

Ignore Duplicate Content

We all know the importance of original content on our website. Normally we do avoid copying content from some other websites, but what about if it is being copied from your own website?

Try not to use any content which might become duplicate content on your website. I still remember one of CEO of the company, in which I was working, he argued with me to post the same content from some of their websites to use on another websites of theirs. I strongly rejected the same and I lost the job very soon.

But my point is that I won’t encourage any bad means as far as the SEO’s of some websites is concerned. I cannot use any black-hat SEO technique on websites which I am managing.

Remember the fact that these days Google is also ignoring the nofollow or noindex requests and can even penalize your website for content which you thought you stopped them to follow or index.

Use Sitemaps & Robots.txt

The last but not the least ranking factors which we normally ignore are using sitemaps and robots.txt file. These two things are normally ignored by webmasters but they are quite important as far as SEO is concerned.

These two things might stop Google to crawl and index your website and all your hard work might goes into vein. Honestly the XML sitemaps increases the visibility of your website on search engines, and you should not ignore them. On the other hand make sure that robots.txt file should not ever block your website from accessing search engine boats.

Ask one of my friends Payal, how difficult it was for her to manage when robots.txt file of her website girlxplorer.com stopped Google to access her site.

Though as I said there are more than hundreds of ranking factors which Google does consider these days for ranking your website, discussing 7 out of them is too less. But then these are some of the most important ranking factors which we normally don’t focus on. Hope you all like my recent blog posts on SEO, like the SEO Myths one which I published on 19th November and then the SEO Tactics one which I published yesterday only, and now this one.

Please do let me know if you are thinking about a ranking factor which is highly important and we missed in this blog post. We will try to figure out them in some upcoming posts. Please also do share your response about this blog post of mine.