Creating content is essential for any website to rank in search engine results. But simply having content isn't enough to help your site rank based on the keyword terms it's targeting. According to a study by Ahrefs, 91% of online content generates no traffic from Google. So, what do we need to know to create content that search engines value? Relevance of content to user intent is its most important ranking factor since if your content is not relevant to a search, it will be devalued.
Deep or extensive content addresses as many user concerns as possible while providing new perspectives. Even search engines seem to prefer long-form content for many informational user searches. A HubSpot study found that content between 2,250 and 2,500 words tended to receive the most organic traffic. This appears to be the sweet spot for SEO, although creating pages of much more than 2500 words, when necessary, can also be beneficial.
Despite the rise of semantic analysis, SEO tags play an important role in content creation. Ultimately, we design websites for both people and search engines. When we plan for users, it's always good to see your website and its content from a new perspective. It has long been suspected that user participation, or user signals, are a ranking factor for Google, even indirectly. Next, we must consider how our technical structure affects user engagement and keyword ranking. Technical SEO could be viewed as the basis of SEO, where everything else is based.
Without a solid technical foundation, your content warehouse will collapse. This makes the interconnection practice extremely important, which we'll discuss later. For now, we'll just be concerned with making sure that our website is crawlable and that our crawl budget is optimized. The number one technical error we found on customer sites is linking to mixed content or HTTP pages. This can happen during an SSL migration and is due to several causes.
While, in theory, pages should be redirected to their HTTPS equivalent, having links to mixed content is not advantageous. Most importantly, these links don't always redirect. As necessary, you don't want content that links to broken or redirected pages. Not only can this affect speed, but it can also affect indexing and crawl budgets. Usually, you need clean URL structures with 200 status codes.
However, as websites age and companies change, it can be not easy to maintain consistency across the site and a strong interconnection structure. Creating an interconnecting structure organized around similar themes allows the lower pages of the site to draw some authority from the higher-authority pages. Tags are even implemented to help manage content and help readers understand the context of specific topics. Title tags, after content, are the second most crucial page factor for SEO. Along with intelligent internal links, SEOs must ensure that the category hierarchy of the given website is reflected in the URLs. This URL clearly shows the information hierarchy on the page (the history of video games in the context of games in general).
Search engines use this information to determine the relevance of a given web page. Due to the hierarchy, the engines can deduce that the page probably belongs not to the story but to the history of video games. This makes it an ideal candidate for search results related to the history of video games. You can speculate on this information without processing the page's content. The URL structure is crucial because it helps search engines understand relative importance and adds a valuable relevance metric to the page.
It's also beneficial from an anchor text perspective, as people are likelier to link to the relevant word or phrase if the keywords are included in the URL. This is why SEO has become a multi-billion dollar industry - optimizing websites for higher rankings and increased traffic by understanding Google's ranking factors. Organic rankings in Google are determined by an algorithm that considers several SEO characteristics and metrics - these are your ranking factors. In this article, you'll find five essential website SEO factors that matter most when optimizing your site for higher rankings and increased traffic. Suppose you want your website to rank higher and generate more organic traffic. In that case, you need to familiarize yourself with these five on-page SEO factors: keyword research, URL optimization, meta tags, header tags, placement of keywords in content, image optimization, etc. Companies who don't have time or knowledge about these on-page SEO factors can benefit from partnering with Marvel Marketing. For SEO purposes, it's a good idea to perform a technical SEO audit of your site every two months to check for 404 errors, redirect loops, broken links, etc.