Having a website is not good enough. You will need to take stock of factors to ensure that your target audience finds you when they make any query related to your product or service. Search engines keep updating algorithms to enhance the user experience. It generally prefers those sites that provide user-friendly content. 

Writing content that appeals to both search engines and users is not easy. There is no denying that you need to provide high-quality content to your users, but you need to impress search engines first. Otherwise, your website will struggle to come on the top results.

You may highly focus on the quality of content, but this is one of the factors search engines consider to decide the ranking of your website. Since Google keeps updating its algorithms, you cannot get to know precisely which benchmarks it follows to determine the ranking for a website. There can be over 100 factors, but the most popular are as follows:

Backlinks

A link is a connection between two web pages.web pages. Interlinking is connecting different pages of your website while external links point to other sites from your web pages. Any link that comes to your website from external sources is known as a backlink or inbound link. 

• Backlinks are essential to inform search engines that the third-party website finds it worthy of sharing your content with its readers. When search crawlers notice a site with a ton of websites pointing to it, they believe that it provides useful content. 
• Since the ultimate goal of search engines is to ensure search results are relevant to users, they will give a higher ranking to your website. Bear the following points in mind:
• Backlinks from a top-ranked website count more than a low ranked site.
• Backlinks should come from relevant websites. Otherwise, Google will consider it a black hat SEO.
• It will help if you do not rush to creating backlinks. Otherwise, Google will interpret it you are manipulating with the ranking.

Quality content

More than anything else, search engines aim to provide a positive experience to users. Even though you have a ton of backlinks, it will take you nowhere if visitors do not find the content worth reading. If your content fails to provide them with a solution, they will shut down your website and go to your competitors, and the bounce rate will go up as a result. 

Thin content will not work in your favour at all. Make sure that you offer something that serves a purpose.  

Mobile-friendliness

Another important ranking factor is mobile-friendliness. Nowadays more than 90% of people bank on cellphones to search anything. Mobile traffic to a website is more than the traffic from a desktop. Therefore, it is crucial to have a mobile-friendly website.

Without having a mobile-friendly website, you will lose more than 70% of your prospects. Make sure that people could access your website through both a cellphone and a desktop. Though you need to blow away search engines to get a higher ranking, you also need to look after the user experience. 

• Make sure that your website has a responsive design so that it automatically resizes to fit the device. 
• Ensure that the content is readable on the small screen.
• Make sure that the essential information does not hide due to ads.

Content optimisation

Content optimisation is another factor that Google takes into account to decide the ranking of a website. Here comes the role of keywords – words or phrases people that use to find information on Google.

The use of keywords needs to be done carefully. Overstuffing leads to poor ranking. However, the main keywords are not enough to bring results. You should also integrate search terms related to your target keywords. It increases the chances of being seen among the results.

Apart from the smart integration of keywords, you need to understand the search intent. It means what people are looking for. 

For instance, if you want to rank on 12 month loans with bad credit as a keyword, you may think that the user is looking for a direct lender offering 12 month loans. If the user is using this keyword to get an online calculator to estimate the total cost of the loan, your page will not be useful. 

Sometimes it is evident with the search term what they are trying to figure out, but sometimes it requires much deliberation.

Using videos in content

Search engines monitor the length of content, presentation, website layout and the page speed to determine the ranking of a website. Being ahead of the pack is not quite easy, especially if you are new to the market. If you want to get a higher rank, you need to feed search engines with something new and unique that your competitors may not have. 

Videos can help you. Textual presentation is essential, but videos make it more engaging. Video content attracts a ton of visitors to a website. You can easily communicate a message to your users, and they will comprehend it in a better way. Videos can help you make a purchasing decision more quickly. 

Understanding the technical part of SEO

Content is king, but it is not everything. Even top-notch content cannot help you rank on the top page of search results if you fail to consider the following aspects of SEO:

• Use keywords in page titles.
• Create meta titles and meta descriptions to tell search engines about the page.
• Give alt tags to images. 
• Focus on how long people spend time on your website.
• Check a bounce rate and click-through rate.

By following the ranking factors mentioned above, you can ensure that your website appears on the top results when a user makes a relevant search query. Google algorithms keep changing the benchmarks to decide ranking for a website. Make sure that every time Google introduces updates, your website rank does not plummet. If you know what search engines want and what users want, you can maintain the ranking.