Search engines know that people want to find answers as fast as possible, so they prefer to show sites that will load quickly for users. This is even truer for mobile sites, as Google announced that its Speed Update would make load speed a ranking factor for mobile searches. Mobile-friendliness refers to how a website looks and performs when someone views it on a mobile device. Mobile-friendly sites provide a good user experience by using a responsive design that adjusts the content so that it looks good on every screen size. There are 200+ SEO ranking factors that help search engines determine which sites should show in search results and how they should rank. If you want your site to claim the top spots on SERPs (search engine results pages), you need to optimize your online presence to cater to these factors.
This can be trickier than just looking at your daily rankings but will give you a better idea of the success of your SEO strategy and how you’re perceived. In 2025, SEO will focus less on raw keywords and more so around search intent across diverse platforms like social media and LLMs. As well as this, it’ll be important to produce more video content as discovery platforms integrate these more into their SERPs. SEO is both the art and science of improving a website, and pages within, to be as visible as possible for when people search for a relevant topic within any search platform. Dive deeper into the Bing ranking factors and Bing ranking algorithm to craft a winning strategy in 2025.
Channel Authority
- Make sure you are not creating backlinks that are violating Google’s guidelines.
- Penalties can significantly impact your site’s search engine rankings, either through automatic algorithmic actions or manual reviews by the search engine’s team.
- Next, we’ll walk through 12 proven strategies to improve your rankings in Google Maps SEO and get more customers through your doors.
- We had some things listed on that page relating to page experience as ‘systems’ that were actually signals.
This is considered of greater importance out of the two when it comes to ranking factors. Trusted sites can get away with more and enjoy higher rankings across the board. Trust is measured across a range of signals including links from highly trusted sites. While not strictly a negative factor, the meta keywords tag was originally used to help software indexing. Having outbound links on your site could add value to your own content which Google may view positively but the links themselves are not a ranking factor.
Search engines still include your URLs in your overall score – they just don’t hold the same prominence they once did. Once again, we have an excellent resource for more in-depth information on HTML image optimization. We discussed the importance of visual on-page assets on your page, now it’s time to examine their technical aspects SEO Anomaly more closely. Optimizing for visual search now can help future-proof your content. One way Google weights your site is based on E-E-A-T, or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
You’ll see that the first page of Google is almost exclusively filled with online business directories. If your business has more than one location, create a separate, localized web page for each one, including name, address, phone number, office hours, contact details, etc. Individual on-page factors include presence of NAP, keywords in titles, and domain authority.
Semrush helps you:
Anchor text – the actual text linked in a hyperlink – provides context to users and to search engines for the page that the link is directing to. Relevant, keyword-rich anchor text can help with SEO, while over-optimization or irrelevant anchor text can be detrimental. Proper keyword optimization will help ensure your content is appropriate for users’ search queries. This includes strategic placement of primary and related keywords in titles, headers, and body text to enhance relevance without overstuffing the content.
SEO tools
Google considers sites that use HTTPS to provide a better user experience than those that do not and thus prioritizes them in search rankings. Search engines may view many low-quality links as a manipulation attempt, potentially leading to a decrease in your site’s visibility and ranking. With search engines like Google, the process consists of crawling, indexing, and ranking. The crawler is an online bot that scours the web to collect all the pages out there and save them in a gigantic database called the index. This index is constantly updated with new pages or updated versions of existing ones. When someone searches online, the search engine calls on the index and uses complex algorithms to determine which pages are relevant to show.
You’ll also need to decide whether you will post your content on the purchased domain or use it to redirect to another domain. Anyone involved deeply in SEO knows of success stories where individuals purchased old, expired domains to accelerate SEO gains. The caveat is that the backlink profile has to be free of any evidence of link schemes. If your keyword is missing from those areas, you’ll be prompted to add it.