Google considers more than 200 factors for ranking the website. Marketers should know the key areas where they have to focus their attention in order to increase their website’s visibility. Often it is observed that marketers try out all possible ways to boost up the ranking yet they fail to do so. This is because there are few aspects of your site that don’t affect the ranking. So, it is advisable to know which areas don’t contribute to your website’s ranking so you can focus on key areas.
1. Age of the website –
Google doesn’t give importance to the age of your website. Whether it’s an old or new website, if it includes quality content, strong links, and backlinks, then it would be a more relevant factor for Google to rank your website. For example, if your site was registered in 2016 and includes all authority signals, then Google will favor that site over a website that was registered in 2002.
2. Keywords in Alt tags –
Alt-text is important to enhance your customer’s experience and to resolve image indication problems. But marketers think including keywords in image Alt tags would boost up their rank. However, this is not true as alt text won’t directly affect your ranking.
3. Like, shares, tweet counts-
If you have a Facebook page with over 20,000 shared posts, it’s not a factor that Google would consider to rank your website. However, if you share posts on Facebook and it encourages more browsing activity, click-through activity, and increased branding, then Google cares a lot about these points and soon you will see your website on top of SERP.
4. Higher bounce rates –
If people spend less time on your site, then Google won’t take this as a negative sign rather it could be that you are serving faster loading page to your customers. And, it may also be that people easily get what they are looking for. So, the time may be lower but the bounce rate could be higher on your website.
5. Using different header tags –
Google doesn’t care what header tag you use in your website. Whether it is H1, H2 or H4 tag, they are only used for design purposes and in HTML and CSS. The fact is Google just look at the content of your website and say this one is big and bold so it must be a headline. Using header tags have no impact on ranking your website.
6. Information on the right-hand side of search results-
Sometimes you get the information panel on the right side that can show you around the web and Wikipedia. This doesn’t affect your ranking for any other search query. When sites get popular and bigger online or offline, they provide site links and knowledge panels. So, this is not what you should worry about.
-Anushree Srivastava
