Category: Ranking Factors

Hopefully, you will have already realised we are not talking about eating food to help your SEO, much as that might appeal to us all. Instead, the acronym E-A-T stands for Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness. Given that E-A-T, is something which Google’s algorithms are focussed on, it is something every website owner needs to understand.

Those three words mean that Google has moved on from just looking for quality content. A quick point to make here is that does not mean that you should let your standards drop and stop producing quality content. That requirement has not been abandoned, however, Google are taking things a step further.

Google is continually striving to make its search engine results as close to the user’s intention, as possible. Taking that a stage further it means they want the destination that users arrive at, to give them the best user experience possible.

Put yourself in Google’s shoes for a moment and imagine you had to determine what websites are going to achieve that goal, and which are not. How about fake news websites, or websites with lots of content, but otherwise full of affiliate offers for sale?

What about those with misleading sales messages or hyped up claims? And, how about websites that look like they offer content, but it is really just sales copy dressed up as content?

Continue Reading..

Whenever you register a domain name, details such as your name and address and the date of registration are held by an organisation called ICANN. If someone wants to determine who owns a website, they conduct a WHOIS search which will tell them. For privacy reasons many web owners hide these details, but this raises the question as to whether this will negatively impact on your SEO rankings?

To address this, we need to understand what Google’s entire ranking algorithm is designed to achieve. Google can only survive if web users continue to use it as a search engine. This means that the results which Google presents for any given search term need to be relevant and show websites that the user would be happy to visit.

The degree to which Google establishes whether any single website is worthy of showing up in its results is established by taking multiple factors in to consideration. For each of these, Google’s algorithms then apply a score to that site based on what it considers to be a positive or negative indicator.

When it comes to your WHOIS details there may be many valid reasons why you would want to keep your details private. It could be that you want to avoid your employer discovering that you are running a website. Another might be to avoid strangers knowing your home address. Whilst these are perfectly reasonable, unfortunately, Google knows private WHOIS registration is something that potential spammers use, and this is where it could impact your ranking.

Continue Reading..

One of the biggest mistakes many website owners make is failing to measure the impact that their SEO activities have made. This is akin to following a diet and exercise program, and then not bothering to check your weight.

There are two specific SEO metrics which Google looks at very closely to see if the visitors they send to a website via their search results are having a good experience. These are ‘Page Views‘, and ‘Session Time’.

If you have a business with an online presence, it is not enough to have people visit your website; you want them to engage with the website and the content therein. The more that they read articles, watch videos and click through multiple sections of your website the better.

The level of engagement that a visitor has with your site, is measured by a metric called ‘page views’. A high number of page views tells you that visitors are taking an active interest in your website, whereas a low number suggests they are disinterested in looking through it.

This data is measured by Google, and if they see that visitors are clicking through to lots of pages on a website they will increase the ranking of that site. The reason for this is that they want their search engine results to show sites that encourage activity. One way this is achieved is with great content that users find interesting.

Compare this scenario to a site which has little or poor content and as a result, visitors very rarely click through to other pages. The page views metric will be low, therefore, Google reduces the ranking of that site.

Continue Reading..