How To Improve SEO Ranking In Google? 10 Elements That You Should Know!

How To Improve SEO Ranking In Google? It is the most common question raised by internet marketers. Honestly, I also really what to know the complete answer.

Google has its algorithm to list different relevant web pages on its Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). I believe you had the experience to search for something from Google which is the most popular search engine in the world.

When you want to search something, for instance, “Make Money Online”, you will type in “Make Money Online” in the search box in Google. Then, a list of the relevant web pages will be shown in the Google SERP.

Finally, you’ll probably click on the first three links only and are already able to find your answers.

Google Search Engine Result Pages

According to the statistics on Smart Insights, Google continues to dominate the market share of the search engine industry with 73.34% on desktop net market share in 2020. Therefore, every internet marketers want to rank top on Google SERP.

According to the same statistics, the first five organic results on the first page of a Google search account for around 67.60% of all the clicks for a search query.

However, there are only 3.73% of clicks on the six to ten results on the first page of a Google search.

As a result, every internet marketers are always trying their best to improve their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which means to rank their web pages on the first spot, or at least on the first 3 to 5 positions, on Google SERP.

Therefore, come back to the important question: How To Improve SEO Ranking In Google? Honestly, no one knows the complete answer because it is the secret of Google. They just revealed some principles to improve SEO.

Also, their SEO algorithm is always changed and updated.

For example, they just announced their latest Google Core update on May 4th, 2020 which revealed some modifications of their ranking metrics.

According to the revealed principles from Google and different kinds of research from SEO experts, I think there are 10 major elements to improve the SEO ranking in Google. These 10 elements are:


1. Higher Hosting/Loading Speed, Higher Ranking

Nowadays, the hosting/loading speed is very significant for your overall ranking. It is because Google thinks that the faster loading speed of your website could give a better user experience.

As a result, if you can give users an excellent user experience, Google will certainly love your website and give your website a higher ranking.

The bounce rate is one of the elements to measure user experience.

According to Jakob Nielsen who is a Danish web usability consultant and holds a Ph.D. in human-computer interaction. He said the ideal response time for a website is 0.1 seconds which can give users a feeling of instantaneous response.

While users will feel a slight delay for 1 second response time for a website but they still feel in control of the user experience.

However, 10 seconds is the limit. If the loading time of a website is more than 10 seconds without any feedback, users will often leave this website immediately.

Bounce Rate
(Image Credit: Google)

Google also do similar research for Mobile Page Speed. According to their survey, if the loading time of a mobile page is between 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%.

Meanwhile, if the loading time of a mobile page is between 1 to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce will increase by 123%.

As a result, you can see how hosting/loading speed can seriously affect the user experience and bounce rate of a website and further result in affecting SEO ranking.

You could use Google’s PageSpeed Testing Tool to check your page speed for both mobile and desktop versions. It will give you a score and analysis of the loading speed of your website. It is better to get 90-100 marks from this test.

For example, my site, YoungRichFree.com, scores 100 in the mobile version and 99 in the desktop version respectively. Thanks to Wealthy Affiliate which is my website hosting and provides the fastest hosting in the Managed WordPress industry.


2. Theme/Plugin Speed Also Matters

The second element to improve your SEO ranking in Google is also speed. But this time is the Theme/Plugin speed.

There are so many themes and plugins in the market and these themes or plugins will certainly affect your ranking in Google. It is because these themes and plugins require bandwidth. I don’t want to talk too much about what bandwidth is because it is too technical.

In a nutshell, higher bandwidth usage, lower speed, and lower-ranking in Google. Therefore, we should carefully consider choosing our WordPress themes and plugins for our websites.

Since there are so many themes and plugins on the market, some of them are poorly programmed and require too much loading time on your website which results in slowing down your website.

I know we have to use some themes and plugins for our website, but we should consider them very carefully. I do recommend checking your page speed on Google’s PageSpeed Testing Tool after you add a new theme or plugin to ensure that it will not affect your loading speed and SEO ranking.


3. User Design In Mobile Version Comes First

Do you have a mobile phone? I asked this question 20 years ago. But if I ask this question nowadays, you may think I’m mad or something. Meanwhile, I begin to ask someone, especially young people, do you have a computer?

The number of mobile phone subscribers increases throughout the years. According to The International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) statistics, the number of mobile-cellular telephone subscriptions increases from 2,205 million in 2005 to an estimated 8,304 million in 2019.

Therefore, Google started to look at the mobile version of your website first when they determined your ranking a few years ago. If you have no mobile versions of your websites or your websites could not work well on mobile phones, your websites are probably ranked low.

Therefore, please make sure you have mobile versions of your websites which mean there is a responsive design of your websites. Luckily, I could tell you that almost all WordPress themes consist of Responsive design. Your WordPress-based websites can change to mobile versions automatically when someone visits your websites on their mobile phones.

If you want to check whether your websites work well on mobile, pick up your phone, and type in your URL on Safari or other browsers, you can see the result.

You can also check it through Google’s Mobile-Friendly checker, Google will tell you whether your websites are suitable to browse on mobile phones.Mobile Friendly Test


4. Don’t Run Too Many Ads

As an affiliate marketer, I certainly want to run ads on my website. I think there are no successful affiliate marketers who run no ads on their websites.

However, don’t run too many ads on your websites. More ads on your websites don’t mean that you will get more revenues but slower loading pages and lower SEO rankings.

Google is already revealed one of the ranking factors to ads is that:

“Does the content have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?”.

Even though you are just running Google Adsense which is an advertisement program run by Google on your website, you should not put too many ad blocks on your websites.

It is because it will affect the user experience and the speed of your websites. Think about this, when you are visiting a web page and reading an article on it, you probably don’t want to see ad blocks between every paragraph. I think it will be very annoying and you will probably leave this website immediately.

In the end, the ranking of this web page will go down even it is a high-quality article.


5. Focus: Writing High-Quality Content

High-quality content is always the focus of Google SEO ranking. There are so many factors in the Google ranking metrics and I think the content quality is the focus and it is the only factor that you can completely control.

What content is of high quality in Google’s eyes?

High Quality ContentFirst of all is the original content. Don’t be a copy cat, write your original article.

Google can easily realize that your articles are original or not. If your website is full of duplicate contents, your ranking will be very low and the worst scenario is your website will be disappeared from SERP of Google.

The second one is the content structure. A good structural article can improve the readability of users. Just like this article you’re reading, I intentionally divide the 10 elements for improving SEO into 10 blocks under different sub-headers.

I believe readers can easily notice that what’s this article about, even they just read the sub-headers.

The third one is sufficient and useful information. A lot of people use the internet to find their answers to different questions. They are looking for information that can genuinely solve their problems.

Therefore, Google thinks that if your content is useful, sufficient, and able to solve a lot of peoples’ problems, they will probably rank your web page higher so that more and more people can read your web page to solve their problems.

The fourth one is your opinion and experience on the topic. Sometimes, people are looking for opinions or comments. For example, many people are looking for answers on how to make money online. They’re not just looking for the methods, they also look for opinions and experience from real people, even though it is a fail or success story.

Therefore, try to share your opinions or experience in the content. It may attract some people who are looking for advice.

Another example is that many people want to know what is the best free affiliate marketing training program. They will look for someone who has experience in certain affiliate marketing training programs.

In this case, I wrote a review article to share my genuine experience of Wealthy Affiliate which I think is the best free affiliate marketing training program. I believe it can help visitors to make their decision after reading my review.

The last but not least, readers’ participation is also an important factor to make your content high quality. Please invite your readers to share their comments on your articles and exchange your views with them.

More interactions between visitors, higher SEO ranking. It is because Google thinks this web page provides excellent content and user experience so that visitors are willing to share their comments with you.

Of course, there are just a few of the factors to write high-quality content, you can think of more methods or techniques to improve your content quality.

Getting a chance to get help from famous writers or authors, they may tell you more skills to write an excellent article. My favorite training platform, Wealthy Affiliate, provides a lot of training on writing high-quality articles, you could join it for free to take a look at it.


6. Building Up Relevant Backlinks

Build Up BacklinksBacklinks are incoming links from other websites to your website. This is another ranking factor that is heavily weighted by Google.

An incoming link from a high-authority domain can help to improve the authority of your website and bring more traffic from that link.

Moreover, Google likes domains with higher authorities, therefore Google will rank these websites higher.

Many years ago, many internet marketers recognized this “loophole”. A lot of “Link Farms” were created.

A link farm is a group of websites that all link to a particular website to increase the number of incoming links.

For instance, you have a website A, then you may create a lot of other websites B, C, D… Z which there is no content on them but just links to website A. As a result, website A gets a lot of incoming links and its SEO ranking can be improved.

This black hat SEO strategy worked many years ago, but don’t do it nowadays. Otherwise, your website A will be disappeared from the Google SERP because Google already fixed this loophole.

In a nutshell, please obtain your backlinks naturally by providing high-quality content. High-quality content will attract other website owners to link to you as a reference for their visitors.

Meanwhile, you can obtain links proactively by inviting other website owners to link to you, but please make sure the quality of your content is high.

One more thing about backlinks is that the authority of backlinks (Quality) is more important than the number of backlinks (Quantity). I will prefer to obtain one backlink from Google rather than 100 backlinks from a link farm. Anyway, if you find my article useful, please link it to me. 🙂


7. Optimizing Your Images

Images Optimization is about two things. The first one is related to the speed of your website and the second one is about image searching.

First of all, how to optimize your images on your website? Large image size will slow down your website. Therefore, please reduce the image size as small as possible while retaining the quality of an image.

Moreover, please give a descriptive filename for your image which include alt text. A descriptive filename with alt text can help Google to identify an image more easily. Don’t use “IMG_008” or “Photo008” as your filename, use a proper descriptive filename so that Google can easily crawl your website.

Also, more and more people make their Google queries by searching for images rather than texts nowadays. Therefore, if your images are optimized by filenames and alt texts, they are more likely to be displayed on the first page of Google SERP.


8. Updating Your Content Regularly

Content, Content, Content.

Content is almost everything for SEO. Therefore, I said high-quality content is very important for SEO and high-quality content should consist of the latest information.

For example, if you search for the best mobile phone, you will immediately leave a website which is still introducing Nokia 8210 to you. Therefore, this kind of poor user experience will certainly affect SEO ranking.

To keep your website fresh, please update your content regularly or write articles with the latest information on your website. Google will see it as an indicator of the relevancy of a website.

You can simply set a schedule to update your content such as making updates as needed quarterly. If you have a blog, you can write one new post every week and modify old posts quarterly for instance.

So, please come back to this website three months later, you will find there are more blog posts and this article may be modified.


9. Organizing Your Site Hierarchy

According to Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide, the navigation of your website is very important for search engines as well as helping your visitors to find their information from your website.

All websites have a “Homepage” which is the root and the starting point of a website. Then, you should think about how visitors will go from your homepage to a specific content page. Also, you should classify different pages into different categories or menus. Website HierarchyFor example, you have an electronic product review website. You may create 3 menus called “About Me”, “Product Reviews” and “Contact”. Then, under the “Product Reviews” menu, you may create 3 sub-menus called “Computers”, “Printers” and “Televisions”. Finally, under each sub-menus, you may create another sub-sub-menu for different brand names or a list of your product review pages.

For instance, when I am going to find the best printer, I’ll start at the homepage, click the Product Reviews menu, then click the Printer menu, then click on the specific printer review page. (Homepage –> Product Reviews –> Printers –> Cannon –> Canon Pixma MG3620 Color Inkjet Printer Review)

Moreover, creating a navigational page is a good practice for visitors and search engines. It is a simple web page that shows the entire structure of your website.

It consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages of your website. Visitors can go to this navigational page to find their desire web page very easily. You have to make sure all the pages of your website are reachable from this navigational page.

Google also loves this kind of navigational page because it allows them to crawl your entire website easily. If your website can provide an excellent navigational experience for users, Google is likely to put your website on top of their SERP.


10. Researching Long-Tail Keywords

Keyword research is so important for SEO. If you can find a less competitive keyword, you will easily to rank higher in Google SERP.

As you can see from the diagram below, the competition of a single general word such as “shoes” is very high. However, the competition of long-tailed keywords or key phrases such as “Men’s Rockport Prowalker” is much lower. Therefore, to improve SEO ranking, we should write content targeted in long-tail keywords.

Meanwhile, we should make sure these long-tail keywords get enough searches. In the nutshell, we should target long-tail keywords with low competition and a large number of searches.

Long Tail Keywords

There are many keyword research tools in the market, Jaaxy is one of them and this is what I always use for searching long-tail keywords.

As you can see in the picture below, it is the dashboard of the Jaaxy. If I type in “how to make money online” for instance, Jaaxy will show you the metrics of this long-tail keyword and other relevant key phrases. The metrics consist of :

Avg: The average number of searches that the keyword receives per month.

Traffic: Visits to your website if you achieve first page rankings in the search engines.

QSR: Quoted Search Results, the number of competing websites ranked in Google for this exact keyword.

KQI: Keyword Quality Indicator, Green is great, Yellow is OK, Red is poor.

SEO: A score based on traffic and competition, the higher the score, the more likely you will rank for this keyword on the first page

Domains: Availability of domains that are related to this keyword.

Jaaxy Dashboard

According to the training of keyword research provided by Wealthy Affiliate, the two most important factors are QSR and AVG.

QSR indicates the competitiveness of keywords. I will choose a keyword which its QSR is below 100.

Meanwhile, AVG indicates the search amount of keywords. I will choose a keyword which its AVG is above 30.

It is just my simple selection process, you could consider more criteria for keyword research. After choosing your particular keyword, you can start to write an article targeted in this particular keyword. If you want to try Jaaxy, please click here to start finding your best long-tail keywords, its FREE!!


Conclusion – Try Your Best To Improve SEO

Internet marketers want to improve the ranking of their websites in Google. It is because a higher ranking will help to get more organic traffic to their websites. More traffic, more revenues.

Therefore, many internet marketers want to know the “Secret” of the ranking algorithm of Google and “How to improve SEO ranking in Google” become the most common questions among them. Unfortunately, nobody knows the complete answers. Google just reveals some principles for their ranking mechanism.

In a nutshell, I do believe the above 10 factors are the most significant in the ranking metrics of Google. Therefore, if you want to successfully find your particular web page at page 1 of Google SERP, please improve hosting/loading and theme/plugin speed, be mobile-friendly, don’t run too many ads, provide high-quality content, build up backlinks, optimize images, update content regularly, organize website hierarchy and find long-tail keywords for your website.

If you have any comments about improving SEO, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you and I’ll reply to you as soon as possible.

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