Search engine ranking is not done on only one factor; there are roughly 200 aspects that get taken into consideration to determine the SE ranking of your website. Often people focus so intently on keywords and keyword phrases for their search engine optimisation efforts.

They end up losing sight of other important factors. Of course your content and keywords form a huge part of your optimisation. However, forgetting about some other factors will make your optimisation much less successful. So let us look at some of those factors that Google use to determine the SERPs position of your website or web pages.

Stickiness of your website

Google looks at how sticky your website is. Stickiness means the amount of time visitors stay on your site. The longer people stay on your website and the more visitors you attract determines the stickiness of your website. Google tracks the click-through rate and looks at the amount of time people spend on your website. They compare this to websites that are competing with yours. This they do through using the Google Toolbar, Google Search, analytics and Google Chrome. To make your site sticky you need to use correct SEO to attract site visitors.

Link value

Here we specifically look at low value links, unnatural links and untrustworthy links. Basically you will be judged on the company you keep. If you associate with unsavoury websites, you will be deemed to be unsavoury as well. When your website has large numbers of links coming in from untrustworthy websites, it will devalue the trust factor for your own ranking. It is natural that incoming links will show variation.

This is acknowledged by the search engines. But, when you show significant numbers of incoming links that use the exact same term to link, this is perceived as unnatural link building.  The objective of link building is to add value to your website and reciprocal links add value to both websites. Linking to dodgy websites is interpreted by the search engines as being exactly like them.

Bad linking means you are negating your search engine optimisation efforts. Once perceived as consorting with bad websites and trying to ‘game’ the search engines, it will be very difficult to undo the damage. You could face your own website being penalised.

Search engine irritants

Any form of spamming and unethical, or black hat SEO, is not tolerated. Cloaked pages and stuffing keywords into content usually ends with all the search engines penalising the website. Making it difficult for the SE spiders to crawl your website because they often cannot access it through unreliable hosting will lead to your website being labelled as unreliable. Thus, the search engine algorithm may devalue the importance of the website. Your website is made up of several to several hundreds of web pages.

Each web page should have a unique title and Meta tag. Duplicate titles are frowned upon heavily. These are all factors that must be addressed for your search engine optimisation efforts will be far less successful. If you are guilty of any of these actions, it is time to do some problem fixing. No business can afford to penalised or labelled as unreliable or untrustworthy.

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