In the world of digital marketing, having a high Google ranking has always been a primary goal.

What is Google Ranking?

When a user; whether it is a researcher or a potential mega-spending client; types in a keyword or a phrase for Google to search, the position in which your website is listed in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is called your Google keyword ranking.

Because most search results show ten listings per page, a ranking of 1 means you are at the top of the list, while a ranking of 11 means you are on the second page. The higher your position on a SERP, the more organic traffic your webpage should get, which is why SEO has been such a mainstay of small business marketing.

Although Google’s algorithms change regularly, these are some factors that will up your ranking:

Behind the Scenes

When using Google, Bing and so on, the loading speed of your pages is estimated by search engine “spiders” based on the HTML code of your site. Chrome user data adds to the accuracy when Chrome is the search engine of choice. The faster, the better.

Content

The old adage that “content is king” still holds true as there are no shortcuts and appropriate content will always be Google’s friend. However, keeping your content up to date is important as the indexing infrastructure, Google Caffeine, values recently published content.

Also, remember to regard your images as a type of content. By optimizing them with their file name, alt text, title, description and captions, you are sending relevancy signals to Google’s bots.

Keywords

According to Google’s John Mueller, “Having a keyword that appears in the first 100 words of a page’s content is correlated to first page Google rankings, and having your keyword(s) appear as a subheading tag in HTML help us to understand the structure of the page.”

But don’t be tempted to over stuff your content with keywords – see point above!