Its a common question, and not one that is easy to answer, but what do the search engines look for on a website? The answer is lots, but we can never be exactly sure. Alot of the answers that can be read are based on experience, and knowledge that changing one, can help to push your website up through the rankings.
None of the items listed below is the single most important one, it is a combination of them all, that helps your website to rank well. The search engines give some a bit more importance than others, but at the end of the day, they all come together to determine where you should rank.
So, lets take a look, and list the criteria.
Domain:
The domain, like badgespatches.com is the first step. We know the following applies:
Length
Age
TLD (like .com, .co.uk, .us etc)
Pagerank
EMD (Exact Match Domain)
On your website:
There are many things on your website that can influence the search engines.
Crawability (how easy is it for the search engine bots to crawl)
Robots.txt
Platform used (WordPress, HTML, etc)
Internal Links – Number on a page, Anchor Text
External Links – Number on a page, Anchor Text
Usage of Meta Tags – Are they present and being used?
Usage of Meta Tags – Duplication, are any duplicated?
Usage of Meta Tags – Length, Are any to long, or to short?
Images
H1, H2, H3 tags
Content Quality
Content Readability
Content Relevance
Content Duplication
Content Length
Malware
Page status code
Redirections that may be in place
Code compliance
Loading speed
Off your website:
This applies to anything, concerning your website, that isn’t on your website.
Reputation
Inbound Links – Number of
Inbound Links – Page rank of page
Inbound Links – Anchor Text
Inbound Links – Relevance
Inbound Links – Velocity of build
Inbound Links – Diversity of platforms (Is it natural looking, or is it all from one platform ie forum profiles?)
Inbound Link Destination – Front page, internal page etc. Is there a good, natural mix?
Inbound Link – IP address (if all the inbound links come form teh same IP address, it dosen’t look natural).
Social Media
Search engine impression / Click through rate
If you have any Google accounts (Analytics, webmasters etc) and it has access to the following data, this would also be used:
Page Views per visit
Average Time on site
New visitors
Bounce Rate
That is just a small amount of information provided by Minneapolis SEO company, to get us started. If you know of any more, then please do comment below. But remember, we are only looking for the factors that influence the search engines, not their importance in doing so.
The next time someone asks you ‘What do search engines look for on a website‘ you’ll be able to tell them.