You already know that Google uses 200 ranking factors in their algorithm for Page Ranking & I already gives you the Factors about the “Domain Level Factors” and "Site Level Factors".
Now let's talk on the "PAGE LEVEL FACTORS" in this Google's 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List Part – 3.
7. Keyword Density:
Although not as important as it once was, keyword density is still something Google uses to determine the topic of a webpage. But going overboard can hurt you.
8. Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI):
LSI keywords help search engines extract meaning from words with more than one meaning (Apple the computer company vs. the fruit). The presence/absence of LSI probably also acts as a content quality signal.
9. LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags:
As with webpage content, LSI keywords in page meta tags probably help Google discern between synonyms. May also act as a relevancy signal.
10. Page Loading Speed via HTML:
Both Google and Bing use page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on a page’s code and file size.
Identical content on the same site (even slightly modified) can negatively influence a site’s search engine visibility.
12. Rel=Canonical:
When used properly, use of this tag may prevent Google from considering pages duplicate content.
13. Page Loading Speed via Chrome:
Google may also use Chrome user data to get a better handle on a page’s loading time as this takes into account server speed, CDN usage and other non HTML-related site speed signals.
14. Image Optimization:
Images on-page send search engines important relevancy signals through their file name, alt text, title, description and caption.
15. Recency of Content Updates:
Google Caffeine update favors recently updated content, especially for time-sensitive searches. Highlighting this factor’s importance, Google shows the date of a page’s last update for certain pages.
16. Magnitude of Content Updates:
The significance of edits and changes is also a freshness factor. Adding or removing entire sections is a more significant update than switching around the order of a few words.
17. Historical Updates Page Updates:
How often has the page been updated over time? Daily, weekly, every 5-years? Frequency of page updates also play a role in freshness.
18. Keyword Prominence:
Having a keyword appear in the first 100-words of a page’s content appears to be a significant relevancy signal.
19. Keyword in H2, H3 Tags:
Having your keyword appear as a subheading in H2 or H3 format may be another weak relevancy signal. Moz’s panel agrees.
20. Keyword Word Order:
An exact match of a searcher’s keyword in a page’s content will generally rank better than the same keyword phrase in a different order. For example: consider a search for: “cat shaving techniques”. A page optimized for the phrase “cat shaving techniques” will rank better than a page optimized for “techniques for shaving a cat”. This is a good illustration of why keyword research is really really very important.
21. Outbound Link Quality:
Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google.
22. Outbound Link Theme:
According to Moz, search engines may use the content of the pages you link to as a relevancy signal. For example, if you have a page about cars that links to movie-related pages, this may tell Google that your page is about the movie Cars, not the automobile.
23. Grammar and Spelling:
Proper grammar and spelling is a quality signal, although Matt Cutts gave mixed messages in 2011 on whether or not this was important.
24. Syndicated Content:
Is the content on the page original? If it’s scraped or copied from an indexed page it won’t rank as well as the original.
25. Helpful Supplementary Content:
According to a "public Google Rater Guidelines Document" helpful supplementary content is an indicator of a page’s quality (and therefore, Google ranking). Examples include currency converters, loan interest calculators and interactive recipes.
26. Number of Outbound Links:
Too many do follow OBLs may “leak” PageRank, which can hurt that page’s rankings.
27. Multimedia:
Images, videos and other multimedia elements may act as a content quality signal.
28. Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page:
The number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site.
29. Quality of Internal Links Pointing to Page:
Internal links from authoritative pages on domain have a stronger effect than pages with no or low PR.
30. Broken Links:
Having too many broken links on a page may be a sign of a neglected or abandoned site. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality.
31. Reading Level:
There’s no doubt that Google estimates the reading level of webpages. In fact, Google used to give you reading level stats :
36. URL Length:
Search Engine Journal notes that excessively long URLs may hurt search visibility.
37. URL Path:
A page closer to the homepage may get a slight authority boost.
38. Human Editors:
Although never confirmed, Google has filed a patent for a system that allows human editors to influence the SERPs.
39. Page Category:
The category the page appears on is a relevancy signal. A page that’s part of a closely related category should get a relevancy boost compared to a page that’s filed under an unrelated or less related category.
40. Word Press Tags:
Tags are Word Press-specific relevancy signal. According to Yoast.com:
“The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and more specifically a group of posts to each other”.
Let’s again revise the main Factors which effects Google ranking:
- Domain Factors
- Page-Level Factors
- Site-Level Factors
- Back link Factors
- User Interaction
- Social Signals
- Brand Signals
- On-Site Web Spam Factors
- Off Page Web Spam Factors
PAGE LEVEL FACTORS
1. Keyword
in Title Tag:
Title tag is a webpage’s second most important part of content (besides the
content of the page) and therefore sends a strong on-page
SEO signal.
2. Title
Tag Starts with Keyword:
According
to Moz data, title tags that starts with a keyword tend to
perform better than title tags with the keyword towards the end of the tag.
3. Keyword
in Description Tag:
Another
relevancy signal which is not especially important now, but still makes a difference.
4. Keyword
Appears in H1 Tag:
H1
tags are a “second Title tag” that sends another relevancy signal to Google.
5. Keyword
is Most Frequently Used Phrase in Document:
Having
a keyword appear more than any other likely acts as a relevancy signal. But there is also a concept of Keyword Density comes.
6. Content
Length:
Content
with more words can cover a wider breadth and are likely preferred to shorter
superficial articles. SERPIQ found that content length correlated
with SERP position.
7. Keyword Density:
Although not as important as it once was, keyword density is still something Google uses to determine the topic of a webpage. But going overboard can hurt you.
8. Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI):
LSI keywords help search engines extract meaning from words with more than one meaning (Apple the computer company vs. the fruit). The presence/absence of LSI probably also acts as a content quality signal.
9. LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags:
As with webpage content, LSI keywords in page meta tags probably help Google discern between synonyms. May also act as a relevancy signal.
10. Page Loading Speed via HTML:
Both Google and Bing use page loading speed as a ranking factor. Search engine spiders can estimate your site speed fairly accurately based on a page’s code and file size.
Google's 200 Ranking Factors : Part - 1 Domain Level Factors
11. Duplicate Content:Identical content on the same site (even slightly modified) can negatively influence a site’s search engine visibility.
12. Rel=Canonical:
When used properly, use of this tag may prevent Google from considering pages duplicate content.
13. Page Loading Speed via Chrome:
Google may also use Chrome user data to get a better handle on a page’s loading time as this takes into account server speed, CDN usage and other non HTML-related site speed signals.
14. Image Optimization:
Images on-page send search engines important relevancy signals through their file name, alt text, title, description and caption.
15. Recency of Content Updates:
Google Caffeine update favors recently updated content, especially for time-sensitive searches. Highlighting this factor’s importance, Google shows the date of a page’s last update for certain pages.
16. Magnitude of Content Updates:
The significance of edits and changes is also a freshness factor. Adding or removing entire sections is a more significant update than switching around the order of a few words.
17. Historical Updates Page Updates:
How often has the page been updated over time? Daily, weekly, every 5-years? Frequency of page updates also play a role in freshness.
18. Keyword Prominence:
Having a keyword appear in the first 100-words of a page’s content appears to be a significant relevancy signal.
19. Keyword in H2, H3 Tags:
Having your keyword appear as a subheading in H2 or H3 format may be another weak relevancy signal. Moz’s panel agrees.
20. Keyword Word Order:
An exact match of a searcher’s keyword in a page’s content will generally rank better than the same keyword phrase in a different order. For example: consider a search for: “cat shaving techniques”. A page optimized for the phrase “cat shaving techniques” will rank better than a page optimized for “techniques for shaving a cat”. This is a good illustration of why keyword research is really really very important.
Google's 200 Ranking Factors : Part - 2 Site Level Factors
21. Outbound Link Quality:
Many SEOs think that linking out to authority sites helps send trust signals to Google.
22. Outbound Link Theme:
According to Moz, search engines may use the content of the pages you link to as a relevancy signal. For example, if you have a page about cars that links to movie-related pages, this may tell Google that your page is about the movie Cars, not the automobile.
23. Grammar and Spelling:
Proper grammar and spelling is a quality signal, although Matt Cutts gave mixed messages in 2011 on whether or not this was important.
24. Syndicated Content:
Is the content on the page original? If it’s scraped or copied from an indexed page it won’t rank as well as the original.
25. Helpful Supplementary Content:
According to a "public Google Rater Guidelines Document" helpful supplementary content is an indicator of a page’s quality (and therefore, Google ranking). Examples include currency converters, loan interest calculators and interactive recipes.
26. Number of Outbound Links:
Too many do follow OBLs may “leak” PageRank, which can hurt that page’s rankings.
27. Multimedia:
Images, videos and other multimedia elements may act as a content quality signal.
28. Number of Internal Links Pointing to Page:
The number of internal links to a page indicates its importance relative to other pages on the site.
29. Quality of Internal Links Pointing to Page:
Internal links from authoritative pages on domain have a stronger effect than pages with no or low PR.
30. Broken Links:
Having too many broken links on a page may be a sign of a neglected or abandoned site. The Google Rater Guidelines Document uses broken links as one was to assess a homepage’s quality.
31. Reading Level:
There’s no doubt that Google estimates the reading level of webpages. In fact, Google used to give you reading level stats :
But
what they do with that information is up for debate. Some say that a basic
reading level will help you rank better because it will appeal to the masses.
But others associate a basic reading level with content mills like Ezine
Articles.
32. Affiliate
Links:
Affiliate
links themselves probably won’t hurt your rankings. But if you have too many,
Google’s algorithm may pay closer attention to other quality signals to make
sure you’re not a “thin affiliate site”.
33. HTML
errors/W3C validation:
Lots
of HTML errors or sloppy coding may be a sign of a poor quality site. While
controversial, many in SEO think that WC3 validation is a weak quality signal.
34. Page
Host’s Domain Authority:
All
things being equal, a page on an authoritative domain will rank higher than a
page on a domain with less authority.
35. Page’s
Page Rank:
Not
perfectly correlated. But in general higher PR pages tend to rank better than
low PR pages.
36. URL Length:
Search Engine Journal notes that excessively long URLs may hurt search visibility.
37. URL Path:
A page closer to the homepage may get a slight authority boost.
38. Human Editors:
Although never confirmed, Google has filed a patent for a system that allows human editors to influence the SERPs.
39. Page Category:
The category the page appears on is a relevancy signal. A page that’s part of a closely related category should get a relevancy boost compared to a page that’s filed under an unrelated or less related category.
40. Word Press Tags:
Tags are Word Press-specific relevancy signal. According to Yoast.com:
“The only way it improves your SEO is by relating one piece of content to another, and more specifically a group of posts to each other”.
41. Keyword
in URL:
Another
important relevancy signal.
42. URL
String:
The
categories in the URL string are read by Google and may provide a thematic
signal to what a page is about:
43. References
and Sources:
Citing
references and sources, like research papers do, may be a sign of quality. The
Google Quality Guidelines states that reviewers should keep an eye out for
sources when looking at certain pages: “This is a topic where expertise and/or
authoritative sources are important…” However, Google has denied that they use
external links as a ranking signal.
44. Bullets
and Numbered Lists:
Bullets
and numbered lists help break up your content for readers, making them more
user friendly. Google likely agrees and may prefer content with bullets and
numbers.
45. Priority
of Page in Sitemap:
The
priority a page is given via the sitemap.xml file may influence ranking.
46. Too
Many Outbound Links:
Straight from
the aforementioned Quality rater document:
“Some pages have way, way
too many links, obscuring the page and distracting from the Main Content”
47. Quantity
of Other Keywords Page Ranks for:
If
the page ranks for several other keywords it may give Google an internal sign
of quality.
48. Page
Age:
Although Google prefers fresh content, an older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page.
49. User Friendly Layout:
The page layout on highest quality pages makes the Main Content immediately visible.
50. Parked Domains:
A Google update in December of 2011 decreased search visibility of parked domains.
51. Useful Content:
As pointed out by Backlinko reader Jared Carrizales, Google may distinguish between “quality” and “useful” content.
Although Google prefers fresh content, an older page that’s regularly updated may outperform a newer page.
49. User Friendly Layout:
The page layout on highest quality pages makes the Main Content immediately visible.
50. Parked Domains:
A Google update in December of 2011 decreased search visibility of parked domains.
51. Useful Content:
As pointed out by Backlinko reader Jared Carrizales, Google may distinguish between “quality” and “useful” content.
