Top 20 Google Ranking Factors in SEO: Detailed Guide (2024) - updated

Amit Mishra

May 5, 2018 — 17 min read

Today in this article we will discuss the top 20 SEO ranking factors or you can also say Google Ranking factors. By following these SEO factors, you can increase both your website traffic and Google Search Engine Rankings.

SEO is very important for Google ranking and traffic improvement but you must also have the right SEO skills knowledge. So I will tell you about Top SEO Ranking Factors that will help ease your ranking problems.

Top 20 SEO ranking factors

Nowadays Search engines became very smart and if you want to rank your website or blog then you have to follow the latest SEO ranking factors. however, before discussing “Top SEO Ranking Factors“, we will know what is SEO. SEO’s full form is Search Engine Optimization as you all know. With the help of perfect SEO, we can flash our blog posts to the first page of Google and popular search engines.

So, let’s dive into the article.

1. Get Top-Level Domain Name:-

Google provides more priority to top-level domains than any sub-domain and this factor is sure of great importance when ranking a keyword.

So if you are blogging using Free Blogging Platform like WordPress.com or Blogger, then definitely your rankings will be high in very rare Situations, while the quality of your blog post is very good And your Niche’s Competition does not have any other Post with Top Level Domain (TLD).

So if you are still blogging with subdomains provided by WordPress.com or Blogger, then it is better that you buy your own Personal Domain Name now from a good Domain Registrar like NameCheap or Godaddy. Associate with or set up your own personal WordPress Blog because you are compromising your ranking of content in just $ 10 per year, which is about 600 rupees per year, which is not right in my eyes.

After the purchase of your Domain name a good hosting is required for WordPress blog I recommend you to go with A2Hosting.

If you can not spend 3000/ – rupees annually for your blog, i.e. about 250 rupees, per month or about 8 rupees per day, then I think you should not blog because the world’s best Search Engine like Google has not given you a specific quality targeted traffic, you can not create your online Identity without Targeted Traffic.

If you want to do blogging professionally then you need to invest some nominal amount in it for its success.

2. Age of the TLD is Important:-

How old your domain is, it shows how serious you are to your online identity or your blog or website.

Google rank your posts on the basis of trust and age, old domains with high trust flow means good rankings, Google considers TLD age as a major ranking factor in SEO.

According to my research, I find that domains with age between 5 years to 15 years ranks organically without any backlinks or social shares, they are ranking because of Trust flow they have from high domain authority blogs or websites.

Generally, if you want to rank above your competitors then you have to focus more on “on-page ranking factors” however domains with Age 3 to 5 years need not worry more about on-page or off-page SEO.

3. Use keywords in Top Level Domain:-

Although the existing keyword search for the existing TLD does not affect Page Rankings as much as it used to be, still Google emphasizes this factor to decide the ranking.

That’s why when you search in Google, your search keyword is part of the Top Level Domain of the page, it gets comparatively more High Ranking than other pages, and in Search Engine’s Result Pages that Keyword Is highlighted in the TLD ranks higher.

So if the topic of your website/blog is quite broad, then include the word related to that topic in your domain name like Keywords.

For example, if your website is related to Job and Vacancies, then include the term Job and Vacancy in your Domain Name. This will give your Page more importance to Google for “Job” and “Vacancy” keywords. If you want to check good domain names then check lean domain search tool.

Read: How to Start a blog and earn money (easy guide)

4. Keywords in Beginning of Top Level Domain:-

If the keyword being searched is Exist at the beginning of the Top Level Domain, then Google places the pages of this type higher in comparison to the websites that do not have either Keyword Exist or not at the beginning of the Domain Name.

5. Domain Registration Duration (Most Important):-

Those who are serious about their website and doing it as a business, register their Domain Name for many years. That’s why Google uses this as a Ranking Factor, how many years have you registered for your domain name, or how many years have you renewed your domain.

That is, Google’s time of domain expiration is of great importance in Google’s eyes. If you have registered your domain for 5 years, then your domain will receive a high ranking on SERP than those domains who have registered their domain for only 1 year, whereas in comparison to those domains you Ranking will be less, who have registered their domain for 10 years.

So the better thing is that when you renew your Domain Name next time, renew it for at least 5 or 10 years, so Google knows that you are Serious to your website and maintain it for a long time. Ranking of Your Pages on Google SERP will certainly be a little better than this signal.

6. Use Keywords in Sub-Domain Name:-

Sub-Domain Name by Google is also given equal importance to the top-level Domain Name. That’s why even when you use Free Blogging Services like Blogger or WordPress.com, Google also provides High Ranking for different keywords on your pages in the Search Engine Result Page, though it is a comparison of Ranking Top-Level Domain Names. However, the URL is definitely much more in comparison to the keywords used in the Subdomain name.

Therefore, if you are managing different-different categories of content on your website, it would be better than you maintain each different category with different sub-domains and your sub-domain is also included with the appropriate keywords, all of which Ranking Factors have been applied, which you apply to top-level domains. This will give you more high ranking on SERP to different categories of your website.
This is the reason why Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. recommend all major search engines, websites that appear on mobile, differently through a sub-domain. That’s why we insist that we use Different Domain and Sub-Domain for the same website that is visible on both Desktop and Mobile. That is why the mobile version of the website is usually seen Associated with sub-domain in m.website.com.

7. Do not Create a Long Domain History:-

Domain History is also used by Google as a Ranking Factor. Therefore, when you register your domain with the domain registrar, do not change your Domain Registrar frequently as far as possible, nor do you specify the information such as Contact Address Information, Phone Number, Mobile Number, Email Address, etc.

When purchasing your Domain. Make changes, because when you change this information over and over again, they create a History that Search Engine uses as a Negative Signal. Because if you change this information over and over again, this is an indication for Search Engines that you do not want to share your Domain Identity with people or you want to hide something.

Therefore, as much as possible when buying a domain, fill the Correct Information and select a registrar to buy a domain with which you can host your domain for a long time because as often as you change the Domain Registrar, your Another Change is added to the history of Domain.

8. Exact Match Domain:-

Exact Match Domain (EMD) Names have been used by Google as a High Priority Ranking Factor. That’s why when you do a keyword search that is a website that is Exactly Top Level Domain, then Google gives Top Ranking to that website.

For example, if you search for “tryootech“ keyword in Google, then www.tryootech.com will receive you as First Result because “tryootech” keyword is Exactly Matching from www.tryootech.com Domain.

However, if your site is not getting Top Ranking, even if it is an Exact Match Domain, then it means that Google does not have the quality of that website, so other websites are being given more priority than that.

In this situation, it is better you should focus more on Look and Feel, Content Quality and Other Ranking Factors on your Website and optimize as much as possible, because Exact Match Domain will not get top Ranking, for any other keyword You can think of how difficult it will be to get top ranking, you can apply yourself.

9. Public Vs Private WhoIs:-

Private WhoIs Information is an indication that we want to hide something and Google uses this as a Ranking Factor that has kept our Personal WhoIs Information Associated with Our Domain in Public Access so that any other person can see it and get more information about us or put it in Private Access so that Visitor can know about us at least.

If we have kept it private, then it is an indication for Google that we want to hide something from our visitor. In this situation, Google reduces our website’s ranking compared to those Domain Name who have publicly accessed their Domain Publicly Accessible with WhoIs Information.

Public Whois Information is very important, not just Google, but also Banks, Payment Gateway Providers, Government, Commercial Organizations, and not just Search Engines like Google, and if you keep WhoIs Information of Your Domain private, then any Payment Gateway Company (CCAvenue, PayUMoney, etc …) are not ready to provide Payment Gateway Account for the convenience of e-commerce for your website ie Online Payment Accept unless you publicize your WhoIs Information.

Therefore, whether your Domain Public Provides WhoIs Information, there is definitely a great impact on your domain’s ranking.

Note: If you are a brand then public whois is recommended however you can make your Whois private if you are an individual for security purposes.

So it would be better if you have to Associate your Domain with Private WhoIs, then just ask your Domain Registrar to update your Domain Name to Public WhoIs, or if you can do this yourself Login to your Domain A / c and update your Domain for Public WhoIs Information.

You can use the online tool of http://who.is/ Website to get WhoIs information or domain history of your domain or any other domain. Simply do the Domain Name Specify about which you want to know and you can see the entire Detail of that Domain online.

10. Do not Spam, Your TLD Will Penalized:-

If Google identifies a Domain Owner who is doing any kind of online spamming, then this type of Domain Owner’s Whois Information is monitored specifically by Google and if that domain owner actually If Spamming is doing, Ranking of all of those domains that are registered by that Domain Owner is penalized by Google.

For example, if you get an email list of 10000 users from anywhere and are fully followed without the CAN-SPAM rules, then send them emails again, your domain reaches Google’s Monitoring List, where Google monitors your domain and tries to find out if you are actually doing this intentionally or unwittingly, and if Google thinks you are deliberately sending emails to people without their permission, In that case, Google put that domain name in the Spam List, as well as Access all your details through WhoIs Information and Ranking of all the other Registered Registrations by you also get the punishment of your Spamming i.e. their rank, is also reduced. Many times Google even makes all domains of this type of Spammers Permanently Blacklisted.

Read: What is CAN-SPAM? [FAQs]

Therefore, if you are spamming in any way, do not understand that only after identifying, the ranking of the same domain will be affected, through which you were doing spamming, but the ranking of all the domains you registered will be affected. The better thing is that, as far as possible, avoid spamming, because many times you are spamming inadvertently, there is no possibility of escape.

11. Country Extension of TLD gets Priority:-

If you purchased your Top Level Domain as a Country Domain Extension such as .in, .pk, .ca, jp, etc, of course, Google will definitely give your domain high ranking by giving your domain a special preference in your country. But when it comes to the global ranking, then other top-level domain extensions such as .com, .net, .org, .gov, .info, .edu, etc will be given higher priority on your domain’s ranking. But in general, for very language specific countries, like Germany, a ccTLD (.de) is recommended all around (Source: SEOlutions.io)

So if you want to develop a website or blog, most of which Target Visitors will belong to a particular country, then you should give priority to Country Level Domain Extension. But if you think that International Visitors will arrive at your website/blog and the content of your Website / Blog will be useful for all types of visitors from different countries, then .com, .net, .org, .gov, Give priority to info, .edu, etc.

Although these domains will also take a little longer than the Country Level Domain Extension to receive High Ranking in your Selected Country Level’s Search Results, your domain will also have the potential of getting High Ranking on Global Level.

In this post, I have tried to explain the total number of 11 Factors related to Google Ranking in a fairly simple language, but you can see that the post has become quite big, while at least 189 Ranking Factors are yet to be Discussed.

If you have found this article helpful and informative, and you want me to discuss the remaining 189+ Search Ranking Factors in detail, please share this article on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and share your comment. Please give me a signal that you also want to learn SEO properly and the hard work of writing articles related to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not uncommon.

12. SSL Certificate (HTTP Secure):-

Google checks out any website before it is safe or not. If it is not secure then its Google ranking gradually decreases. A secure site means SSL certificate is installed on-site. You can see it in the browser.

If the site has an SSL certificate installed, the HTTPS of green color will appear in the address bar of your browser and if not, only the HTTP will appear. Nowadays you won’t see green lock as google chrome updated and you might see a grey lock you can see in the below picture.

You can buy SSL certificate from this website.

Read: What is an SSL Certificate?

13. Content Quality and Length:-

The most important thing is that your writing skills should be very good, a visitor should not be bored after reading your post. If you do perfect SEO, but do not write good content then your SEO is useless and visitors will never visit your site again.

However, in order to do more of the length of the article, the extraordinary items should not be used in the article. Write to the point article provide a solution for what the user has landed on your blog.

So always write meaningful and helpful content.

Post length plays an important role in blogging because Google offers more Ranking to Long Posts. Your content should be between 1000 and 3000 words. But keep one thing in mind, do not write nonsense to increase the post length.

9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins and Tools That You Should Use

14. Quality Backlinks:-

Backlinks are the oldest and most important ranking factor. Backlinks are also very important to improve domain authority, Google website ranking, and website traffic.

If your blog posts do not have backlinks, then how much good article will you write, you will rank on the first page however, it would be difficult to rank for the 1st position.

Please note that the topic of your article on which backlinks should be done in the same way from the site and should be relevant to your article.

There are major two types of methods for creating backlinks:

Link Earning: In this method, people link to your blog post because you have created a useful resource and they find helpful in the link back to your content.
Link Building: Here you put your efforts in building some quality links to promote your content, you do guest posts, bloggers outreach to gain some quality links for your better rankings.

If you create bad backlinks for your site, it can badly damage your website ranking. Therefore, always create high-quality backlinks for your website or blog.

If you are proactively not building high-quality Backlinks to your posts for off-page promotion then you will remain out of the race. Go and build quality backlinks to your posts and pages. If you find building backlinks difficult then you can check out the LinksManagement platform where you can get quality links with the nominal cost.

Make sure you check websites before ordering.

15. Ads used in the right place:-

If you use too many ads on the page of your blog, then it hurts the user. For this, you should not keep the number of ads on your page too much. User does not understand what the ads are and what the post is, they find it difficult. Visitors leave the blog very early without reading your article and your bounce rate increases.

Again that is the negative SEO signal for your Google rankings.

This is also one of the reasons why there are no ranks in google. If you want your page to rank on top in google then you have to always keep in mind that your blog should be neat & clean.

16. User Interaction & User Experience:-

In recent days, user interaction (UI) and User Experience (UX) have become one of the most important factors that are considered important in getting top rankings in Google’s search results. Designers and developers need to work on essential factors like making the website speed high and mobile-friendly.

You can use infographics to engage your visitors to your site.

Read: How to Drastically Improve Your Website’s UX

17. Responsive Design:-

Blog Ranking also Depends on its Design and site structure of your website, as if you upload a very nice template on your blog, also customize well, however, if the Template is not Mobile Friendly or SEO Friendly you do not get desired rankings.

Now because the theme is not SEO Friendly, your theme does not provide Search Bots with correct information of your Headings, Subheadings, Images, and Content, because this Bot does not recognize your posts and you will find difficulty in indexing your blog posts.

Similarly, if your Template is not Mobile Friendly then Search Bots does not take users to Mobile Search through your keywords or do not show them on your Blog Post.

Because of this, you might lose a huge audience, so you should buy a Mobile & SEO friendly Theme for your website for better ranking factors. If you ask me I will recommend you go with the GeneratePress Premium theme which I am using on this Blog.

18. Website Loading Speed:-

What if when you are searching for any information online and your post is taking time to display? What would you do? you would wait or you will skip?

Definitely, you will skip, that is in human nature, they can not wait for so long, Likewise, Google also considered Website Loading speed as one of the major ranking factors for SEO.

1 second to 3 seconds is considered as the Good loading time for any website. You should use AMP to open fast on mobile devices.

If you want to check your website’s loading time you can check here: Pingdom or GTMetrix

Sometimes might be the case the website does not load because of your internet connection so make sure the speed of your internet should be good high before judging.

19. Image Optimization:-

Now in Image Optimization, some people have shared wrong knowledge on the Internet, such as Image Optimization means whatever image uploads to your website should be on the Alt tag and this is called Image Optimization.

Note that your image size should be reduced, your image should be representing your content, your image should also contain alt tags. You can optimize your images with ShortPixel Premium Plugin I am using for this plugin website and you can check my website load timings.

If your images are well-optimized Search Bots not only get information about your image, it can recognize your image well and displays it on Google Image search ultimately this will help you to get higher rankings in SERP.

20. Social Sharing:-

Social Sharing simply means that you share your articles on social media, so that people can know about your article and visit your blog, however, we need to use social media as a Google ranking signal, right? How we are going to do our SMO(Social Media Optimization) for our Blog posts?

When you share anything on social media sites, then people are either engaged in action or either Reaction, which shows what people’s opinion is about that content and how many people like that content.

Now if you share a Content / Blog Post, people are not giving any response to it, which means that your content is not good for people who are not liked and that your post search goes down from Result.

This shows Social Response also now has a lot of impact in Search Rankings so you must share your articles on social media sites as well as social Share Buttons on the site so that people can share your article.

Make sure you follow all the Google ranking factors responsible for SEO of your website for better and higher rankings.

21. Title Tags Keyword:-

If you want to rank for a particular keyword then you have to use that keyword in your H1 Title Tag.

22. Click-Through Rate (CTR):

Google is considering CTR as one of the major SEO ranking factors. If a user is searching for any keyword on Google and after that clicking on 7th results in SERP and that link gets more clicks then above 6 and spending the time it sends a positive signal to Google.

You can also try this experiment and you will find it working. One strategy I am using to increase CTR and click on that post. Using Google Search Console you can estimate your CTR.

What I do is I am sending an email to my email subscribers which help my post to get clicks and if they are spending some time reading articles which leads to gain dwell time on that article. This is how I boost my rankings in Google. You can use Aweber (Email Autoresponder) to send emails to your email subscribers. The best part is you can get 30 days trial of Aweber for Free.

23. Use AMP:-

Amp is introduced by google which fastens your pages on mobile devices known as (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Anyone can use Amp which will help you to rank better in Google mobile searches and Google AMP Carousels.

24. Duplicate Content:-

Google is learning fast and keeps on improving its algorithm if you are using the same content with small changes and using on your website can be tracked by google. Spinned Content or duplicate content will ruin the reputation and authority. You can check plagiarism with Grammarly.

25. Quality Of Outbound Links:-

Google also keeps an eye on your outbound links, linking to authority sites will help you to gain trust.

26. Keyword Density:

Keywords are the nuggets or you can say magnets which will help your site to stick to the top of SERP. Use LSI keywords with the same terms 5-7 times in an article will help you to get exposure and it is also a major factor in rankings. You can use my favorite SEMrush for doing Keyword research.

27. Quantity of Outbound Links:

A high number of outbound links will backfire you sometimes, link to limited websites with high authority only or you know which are adding value to your content.

28. Reading Flow:

Readability also plays a vital role in Google rankings however you should maintain the readability level. Google also displays stats for that, write for one not for many. Anytime only one person will be reading your article, write in easy and clear language in which visitors can understand and satisfy their intent.

29. Affiliate Links:

Affiliate links are business veins to your blog and end up earning you good revenue. You can use affiliate links on your blog or website without any harm however make sure to mark them a no-follow attribute. If you don’t know how to add no follow attribute to your links read this article.

30. Page Age:

Google gives more weight to an older post with regular updates. Consistent updation can lead you to outrank your competition and reward you higher rankings.

Also Read:

Now it’s your turn to share your views on how can I help you to rank your website share your issues in comments I will try to help you out.

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