Read full blog post at: https://www.todhost.com/blog/digital-marketing-seo/178-30-most-important-google-ranking-factors-for-beginners

Google has an inconclusive and ever changing list of factors taken into account by its search engine algorithm in ranking a website. However, attempting to optimize a website for all the factors will mean a lot of work and webmasters may not be able to optimize more than 5 websites in a year. Understanding the direction of Google in ranking websites and focusing on the more important factors with greater impact on website overall performance is the recommended way to go. In this post, we take a loo at the most important factors and how to optimize your website for these factors to achieve ranking success in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

On-Page factors:

On Page factors, also called On-site SEO is about optimizing content for target keywords and essentially focuses on the use of proper heading, keyword placement, content quality and many other factors. On Page search engine optimization on any website has the most profound effect on its rankings. From our experience, proper On-Page optimization can significantly affect the possibility to rank within the top ten results in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Here are the critical on-page optimization factors that can affect its search visibility quite significantly:

Keyword in the title tag.

The title meta tag is one of the strongest relevancy signals for a search engines. The tag itself is meant to give the accurate description of the pages content. Search engines use it to display the main title of a search result. Including a keyword in it will indicate to search engine what to rank the page for. Website titles define how a search engine understand the purpose and primary focus of a website and invariably will help search engines what to rank the website for.

It is recommended that the keyword should be placed at the start of the title tag. Pages optimized this way will rank better than those with keyword closer to the title’s tag end. This is generally the rule but we have also seen websites that simply place keywords within the title and not necessarily starting the title with keywords ranking much better than websites that start with keywords in title.

Keyword in meta description tag.

The meta description tag has gained less relevance since Google made it known that it does not use this tag in page ranking anymore. However, we still thin it is important for Google because our tests reveal that a poorly written meta description affects Google's understanding of a website's primary focus and could affect how Google places the website in its search engine result pages. Remember that Google's focus is to give users the best search experience and so Google tries to place websites it considers to be of high quality at the top of its search engine result pages.

Having said that, it should be understood that the meta description tag today is is nonetheless still a relevant signal as it is crucial for gaining user clicks from search results pages. Including some relevant keyword in it makes it more relevant to a search engine and a searcher. The bottom line is that you still need to take the meta description tag very seriously.

Informative.

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