It’s the golden standard – for any SEO professional and small business owner – to be as close as possible to spot number one on the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). There are a couple of things that Google looks at when ranking websites. Here are some of them.
Ranking Factors
Domain age
The older your domain is, the more likely it could be ranked up the first page of the Google SERPs. There are more than a couple of reason why this could be so. However, we would like to suggest that the reason why an older domain ranks more highly than a new one is that Google search bots have had more time to crawl an older site as opposed to a newer one. This means that the older site has received more opportunity to let Google know of their focus areas and is able to rank for them.
The first word in a domain is a targeted keyword
One of the factors which contributes to Google ranking a site highly is if the website’s domain has a targeted keyword as their starting word. So, for example, if you are tying to rank for the keyword “copywriting” if you have a domain entitled “copywritingservices.co.za” you will get the edge over other domains which offer the same service.
Your title tag should start with your targeted keyword
According to Moz.com, if a website’s title tag starts with one of its targeted keywords you have set out for your website, it’s been shown that these websites will perform better than those sites which feature the targeted keyword features at the bend of the title tag.
The H1 tag must contain the targeted keyword
The H1 tag is seen as the secondary title tag of a web page. This means that Google will take queues from your H1 tags in order to determine the subject matter of your site or blog post. So, in order to rank highly for your targeted keyword make sure that your H1 header contains it.
