5 SEO factors you may not know
These days, many if not all of us who know a little about SEO, know of the important factors in ranking on Google and other search engines. I want to explore with this post 5 factors that you may not have heard of.
We all know that links, content and user experience are all major factors on how we rank organically but here are 5 of the factors you may not know much about and some info on what that means for your websites SEO.
Here are my 5 factors that people often don’t realise effects their SEO campaign significantly.
- Page change frequency
- Content/Code ratio
- Host location
- Link positioning
- Social media reputation
Page change frequency – Now this depends on the type of website you are operating, a blog for example or a news source has to have fresh content and that gives out all the right signals to Google and other search engines but a business website shouldn’t be changing a large proportion of its content regularly, this is un-trustworthy. Though there is a fine line between what can help and what can hinder my advice would be to have your main body content as a static section and all the necessary blog feeds, news etc around the pages.
Content/code ratio – There are many theories about what the correct ratio should be but the basic principle is that the more code you have the longer the page download speed of your pages, this is a signal that Google is almost certainly using now and will become more prominent in the not too distant future.
Host location – In Google’s quest to give the searcher the most relevant website for their search one of the factors that definitely affects the results is the host location of the website. For example it makes sense for Google to give benefit to those websites that are hosted in the UK for a UK based search as one would assume that these websites would be more relevant, much like having a .co.uk domain would give off similar signals. In basic terms a UK based business should have a .co.uk domain and a UK based host.
Link positioning – Again Google has been working strenuously to give the best result to a searcher, in doing so they have identified many signals that indicate whether a site is trying to manipulate its index, one of these signals relates to link quality. It is very plausible to assume that a link on a websites sidebar or footer is not as important as a link within the body content of the website.
For many reasons this makes sense but broadly speaking a link within the body would indicate a reference or a link to an authority on the subject much like Wikipedia. A link on a sidebar can equally be downgraded, especially if it is site-wide, because if it was worthwhile to the user it would make sense for it to be involved in the content and not listed on every page, this also has relevancy issues as not all pages on a website would be relevant to any outbound link source.
Social media reputation – For many years SEO’s have speculated that social media does and should impact on search engine rankings though this was largely rejected by Google and others but more recently Google and Bing have both confirmed that they use Social Media data in their algorithms. This was only backed up by the release of Google +1, demonstrating that Google wanted to use a social media justification in the way it evaluates a website.
Here is what Matt Cutts says about Google using social media data in its algorithm:
It is becoming obvious that Google and others are using many more factors as part of their judgement on your website and a healthy balance between all the on-site factors and social media is a great sign of a naturally progressing website, be sure to get involved in social media and use it as an extension of SEO rather than an additional resource.