Links are a very important aspect of SEO. In fact PageRank was the first core algorithm in Google Search and was named after Larry Page (co-founder of Google). PageRank aims at estimating the importance of a webpage on the basis of number and quality of links it receives. In short it is a link analysis algorithm. Besides Links other important signals search engines like Google use to rank pages are Content, User Experience and On-Page Optimization.

While there are over 200 unique signals or “clues” that Google uses to rank pages, they are actually part of very few main sections, of which the 4 most important sections are Content, Links, User Experience and On-Page Optimization. Have these 4 factors correctly applied to your website and your search engine presence will boost up incessantly.

Content
Content is certainly one of the most important factors in SEO as it helps Google to make connections in between the webpage relevance and the search query, relevance being one of the topmost ingredients in Google search.

But what really happens is since content relevance can’t be measured in numbers it often becomes the neglected child of content publishers and SEO companies.

What you need to remember is that just creating content for search engines isn’t the right content strategy. You should rather aim at creating great content for your users and search engines will automatically follow the footsteps.

Links
Links can be internal, external or backlinks. While internal links help in getting your website indexed, external links are simply links pointing to other websites.

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. These links are called as backlinks. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Backlinks are regarded as the number one ranking factor by most SEOs, but that’s not so. In fact putting all your focus on unnatural link building could harm your website’s search engine presence because of Google’s Penguin algorithm update.

Penguin was a crucial and core update in Google’s algorithm which targeted link-spam. It was first launched in the year 2012.

Needless to say that backlinks are an important ranking factor, but they are part of the long term game. As it is the natural links that help build your sites importance in Google.

But most SEOs more often promote short-term link building option of non-earned unnatural backlinks via link spamming tactics. But none of these actually pay off, less so in the long run.

The safest most effective way of building natural links is to create great compelling content that is useful for your users.

User Experience
Web User Experience has a very wide meaning and forms an essential ingredient in Google’s ranking algorithm. It includes various aspects that connect your webpage or your website users with the experience they have while using it.

It includes aspects such as your page-speed, it’s layout, including very specific aspects like how easily users can find the content they were looking for and whether your site uses breadcrumbs or not.

Google takes into consideration all such and many more aspects when ranking a website. For example it launched a Page layout algorithm improvement in 2012 that looked at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content users sees on the page once they click on a result. This new algorithmic improvement impacted sites where there was only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content was persistently being pushed down by large blocks of ads.

Another algorithm update related to user experience was the mobile-friendly update of 2015, which boosted the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Later in 2018, Google launched the Mobile-first indexing update which meant that Google started using the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for. Prior to this update crawling, indexing, and Google’s ranking systems typically used the desktop version of a page’s content.

Performance plays a major role in the success of any online venture and page speed is an essential element of website’s performance. To that end Google launched the site speed update in their search ranking algorithms. Since then it has been one of the main ranking signals and it shows just Google’s obsession with speed. According to Google site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

Structured data, Meta Description and other on-page factors
On-page optimization includes certain specific on-page signals in a web page that can help enhance its search engine presence in Google. While we couldn’t cover all the signals in this post as this would require a complete post dedicated to the topic however we have covered some of the more important and prominent ones.

While some of these on-page aspects are already covered in the above 3 factors, some other on-page factors include things like URL Structure, HTTPS, Meta Description, Structured data, Image names and ensuring that a web page is crawlable or not.

URLs often appear in search results. A well-structured URL offers users a quick hint about the page topic and how the page fits within the website. Though a good URL structure won’t guarantee immediate ranking improvement, an optimized URL structure will certainly help in making your page appear more relevant to a search query which in turn works as a ranking signal.

Google frequently prefers to display meta descriptions of pages in snippets — the short text preview display for each web result. The quality of your snippet can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). Therefore optimizing snippets is good way to improve your CTR or Click Through Rate in Google Search.

Back in 2011, Google announced schema.org, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. Schema.org aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages to help search engines better understand their websites.