On-Page Ranking Factors!

The way your page is optimized can have a huge impact on its ability to rank.

What are On-Page Ranking Factors?

On-page ranking factors can have a big impact on your page's ability to rank if optimized properly. The biggest on-page factors that affect search engine rankings are:

Content of Page:

The content of a page is what makes it worthy of a search result position. It is what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to the search engines. As such, it is important to create good content. So what is good content? From an SEO perspective, all good content has two attributes. Good content must supply a demand and must be linkable.

Good content supplies a demand:

Just like the world’s markets, information is affected by supply and demand. The best content is that which does the best job of supplying the largest demand. It might take the form of an XKCD comic that is supplying nerd jokes to a large group of technologists or it might be a Wikipedia article that explains to the world the definition of Web 2.0. It can be a video, an image, a sound, or text, but it must supply a demand in order to be considered good content.

Good content is linkable:

From an SEO perspective, there is no difference between the best and worst content on the Internet if it is not linkable. If people can’t link to it, search engines will be very unlikely to rank it, and as a result the content won’t drive traffic to the given website. Unfortunately, this happens a lot more often than one might think. A few examples of this include: AJAX-powered image slide shows, content only accessible after logging in, and content that can't be reproduced or shared. Content that doesn't supply a demand or is not linkable is bad in the eyes of the search engines—and most likely some people, too.

How Technical SEO Helps!

Technical SEO can help your site in the age of semantic search in a number of ways:

Titles & Meta- Your title is one of the first things crawled on your web pages. Providing a clear and focused title helps the crawler understand the content on the page. It helps set the tone and begins the process of entity relationships. Meta descriptions are not part of the ranking algorithm, but with semantic search, I believe they do hold more weight. Crawlers read and index your descriptions. Good descriptions not only help click-through rates but also give a short overview of the crawled page. This data is taken into account when the search engine is trying to understand the context of your page.

Site Structure- Having a well-defined and logical site structure is extremely important. Not only does this help your users find the content they need more quickly, but it also helps crawlers understand how your content is connected. Taking the time to develop a good structure will help ensure your site is indexed fully and the search engines have a good idea about your site subjects.

Structured Data- Structured data is metadata that is implemented to help search engines understand content and context. The most common way of structuring data is with the implementation of schema. Semantic search is all about structured data; the whole idea of indexing entities is built around structured data and schema. In the age of semantic search, adding structure to your site’s data is essential for success.

While many believe semantic search is all about more and better content, that is simply not that case. Yes, content is important, but I can argue that technical SEO is also more important than ever. Marketers, site owners and SEOs need to take the time to understand how Google processes data and find ways to help the search engines understand our sites’ content and why it’s beneficial to users.