4 Key Search Ranking Factors You Should Focus On

There is no shortage of advice as to what folks must do to better a blog post’s position in the search engine listings.

Certain people agree, certain people differ, and some people are out-and-out puzzling.

According to the consensus views of the Singapore SEO experts, these are the 4 top search ranking factors.

Targeted Keywords in the Title

The use of targeted keywords in the title is extremely important. It does not only promote better ranking, it also helps with better click-through from the search engine listings to the post. It is of little use to be high up in the search results and not receive that many clicks. The primary goal should be to get as many targeted visitors to your site as possible.

Those keywords that the searcher used are highlighted in bold in the search results. When the right key phrase of your title is highlighted, it stands a higher chance of being seen and receiving that mouse click. However, highlighted keywords don’t comprise the only element to think about when composing the title.

A smartly crafted page title, that invites and entices the searcher to click through, can give you a lot of extra clicks. It is more advantageous to receive a hundred clicks from listing number 5 through having an eye-catching title compared with fifty clicks from the third listing with a badly written title, wouldn’t you agree?

Meta Description (In the case of WordPress, this is called an ‘excerpt’)

The meta description is a 150-character snippet used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines use these snippets in search results to let visitors know what a page is about before they click on it. Therefore it is such a crucial element that without putting effort into crafting your meta descriptions, you could be missing out on good website traffic that can bring in lots of new leads and customers via good click-through rates from organic search.

A great meta description is clear and convincing. You can use an action-oriented language that tells readers exactly what they can do if they click, with words like “Learn,” “Discover,” or “Grab,”, and follow it up with specifics of what exactly they will get if they click.

Or you can summarize a key benefit or solution which would be reason enough to click through and read your post. In other words, you are telling your readers why they should read your content.

The meta description also shows up when you share or bookmark your post on social sites, so one way or another, if you want more readers to read your content and gain something out of it, you can’t do without it.

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The Global Link Popularity of the Website

The number of hyperlinks that are pointing to a website is used by the search engines to calculate the importance of the website. They take into account both the quality and quantity of the links.

It goes to imply that link building is a never-ending endeavor.

One can never have enough backlinks pointing to your site. However, it is also true that one cannot build backlinks too fast and that could trigger some red flags with the search engines.

However, if performed as an ongoing action with a longer term outlook, every link is worth the resources spent in getting it. They all add up to a higher deemed importance of your website.

I would rather recommend that the digital marketer not dwell too much on accumulating how many backlinks in a day or a week, but to focus on creating valuable content that encourages readers to share to their connections, and apply viral marketing strategies to propel the momentum.

Also, in the course of backlinking, external websites will naturally use a certain set of keywords and phrases as anchor text for a link. These anchor texts are saying what your website or blog is about, therefore what topic or theme your site is focused on will define what keywords it will rank for in the search engine listing.

The best way to exert influence in any way the anchor texts that other websites use with their links to your site, is to continually do keyword research to narrow down to a few major specialized topics, identify the long-tail keywords that are relevant to the business, and frequently emphasize and include them in your content to drive extremely targeted traffic to your posts or web pages.

Link Popularity in the Site’s Internal Link Structure

Contrary to what most webmasters think, and despite what is being said above, search engines do not rank whole websites; they rank individual web pages. In most cases, the home page receives the bulk of inbound links. You may have actual income-generating pages that you’d aim to rank high in the search engines, but they do not get sufficient external links. Internal linking—and the anchor text used for the internal links—is the way to distribute PageRank to other pages of your site. To an extent, this will help to build up search engine trust factor for the intended page so that it can have better search engine ranking.

Some SEO professionals say that an internal link has the same value as a link from an external page. That doesn’t mean your website will rank by having only internal links.

What it does mean is that you can cause a page to be ranked by having internal links pointing to it even though it does not have lots of external backlinks, on the condition that the rest of the site has accumulated sufficient PageRank from external backlinks.

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