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Content can include the path (URL), a title for the page, meta description (only viewable to the search engine), headings, textual content (including bold and italic), secondary content, images, videos, and other metadata published in the page (reviews, location, products, etc.). How Do Search Engines Rank Your Pages? Now that the search engine understands the keywords and key phrases of your page, it now needs to rank it with competing pages. Ranking for keywords is at the heart of search engine optimization. Some of the factors involved in this process: Backlinks – are there relevant, popular sites that are linking to your site? Performance – how does your page perform in accordance with Google’s core vitals.
Aside from speed, page errors and downtime can impact whether a search engine wishes to Fax Lists rank you well. Mobile-ready – since many search engine users are using a mobile device, how mobile-friendly is your site? Domain authority – does your domain have a history of relevant, high-ranking content? This is an area of great debate, but few people will argue that a high-authority site doesn’t have an easy time ranking content (even if it’s terrible). Relevance – of course, the site and page have to be highly relevant to the actual search query. This includes the markup, metadata, and actual content. Behavior – search engines like behavior beyond the search engine. However, if I’m a search engine user and I click a link, then quickly return to the search engine results page (SERP), that is an indicator that the search engine result may not be relevant. I have little doubt that search engines must observe this type of behavior. How Has Search Engine Ranking Changed Over The Years? It was fairly easy to game the search engine algorithms years ago.

You could write frequent, low-value, content, cross-promote it (backlink) on various sites, and get it ranked well. An entire industry popped up where consultants spent billions of dollars buying fraudulent backlinks built on backlink farms… sometimes unbeknownst to the organization that hired them. As search engine algorithms changed, they became far better at identifying toxic backlinks over healthy ones, and honest sites (like mine) began to rank again. At the same time, cheating competitors were buried deeply in the search results. At their core, what the algorithms did that was critical was pay attention to the quality of content, the performance of the site, and the authority of the domain… to ensure that the search engine user was provided a good experience. Remember above where I said I tend to differ from other SEO consultants? It’s because I don’t focus as much on the algorithms as on the user’s experience. I’ve said before that traditional SEO was dead.. and it angered many people in my industry. But it’s true. Today, you must invest in the user, and you’ll rank well.
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