Google SEO Success Factors Explained

Are you ready to learn the secret behind SEO? Well, I hate to break it, but there’s no such secret. SEO isn't about any gaming tricks or magic tricks on algorithms. What we really need to know is good in depth understanding of what people need when they search. 

It is essential that one should understand that how Search Engine Optimization factors works and what techniques should be focused on more to get benefits from. Having greater thorough understanding of SEO success characteristics will enable you to achieve and create perfect strategy offering the best results. Here we have focused on what are the SEO factors that leads to success influence. 

Combination

SEO success does not only relies or guarantees on only one factor but there are two major classes of factors which SEO relies greatly:

• On-the-page SEO: These factors are within the publishers control, and 
• Off-the-page SEO: These factors are influenced by others and not by publishers. 

Within these two classes are seven categories of factors, which are:

• Content — Factors relating to material quality of content
• Architecture — Factors for your overall functionality of site
• HTML — Factors specific to web pages
• Trust — Factors related to how authoritative and trustworthy a site seems to be
• Links — Factors related to how internal linking has impact on ranking
• Personal — How personalization has impact on rankings
• Social — Factors on how social sharing impacts rankings

How Does Google Calculate Search Rankings?

Search engines exists for fulfilling a very simple need, that is to connect people to information. When a user search for a particular service or product, Google strives to search through web to find the most useful and relevant bits of content available. 

In other words, Google is trying to help its reader to find the relevant and qualitative information from a website content and is hence ranked accordingly. Google relies on algorithms to analyze, scan and rank the website content. It is these behind the scene calculations made by Google that determines where a content will rank for a specific search terms. 

The Problem Of Calculating Search Rankings

Essentially though, the terms like relevance and quality are subjective. There are no ways to filters the contents by using these qualifiers, so Google relies on heuristic metrics which provides a close quality approximation.

The most popular metrics are the back links and keywords, but that over the years, Google factored all metrics manner into its analysis. Since Google’s first repetition in 2000, each of these metrics have been used for content quality as stand-ins:

• Backlink quantity
• Keyword density
• Content freshness
• Anchor text
• Bold and italic words
• Backlink quality
• Meta descriptions
• Internal links
• Content length
• ALT and tags
• Social shares

But then, there is a serious problem with this approach, since it can be manipulated.

People started to figure out that some of these metrics that informed Google about the search engine rankings, it became possible to alter the contents intentionally to cheat the system. Back link manipulation, Keyword stuffing and paid blogging networks were all techniques that used to successfully disabled Google’s algorithm, helping the low quality content to leap towards the top.  

A Brief History Of Google’s Algorithm Updates

In order to fight back, Google has been constantly updating its algorithms. As their technology has been growing more powerful day by day, their quality metric lists has grown more complex and diverse - creating algorithms that are more precise, harder and accurate to manipulate. There has been till date hundreds of updates for algorithms, and the most notable being the Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird and Pigeon:

2011

This update of Google was released for penalizing unoriginal and short contents.

2012

Penguin was developed to single out those businesses that brought or manipulated the back links for their websites and/or contents.

2013

Hummingbird was designed for improving the semantic search, the exact way Google determines relationship between searched keywords for and the results we want to find. 

2014

Pigeon was developed in 2014 for improving Google’s location based search ranking. 

2015

The Mobile update was done to ensure all the mobile friendly pages ranks at top of mobile search. 

2016

RankBrain, is a part of Hummingbird Google’s algorithm. It is a machine system learning to help Google understand each meaning behind the queries and serve the best search matching results in response to searched queries. 

2017

Fred is the latest Google algorithm that targets the violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines done by websites. 

What Does This Mean For Your Businesses?

Everyone of the Google’s update has been especially designed for helping the search engines to look more closely and identify the most helpful, relevant content available. Their complex algorithm is increasing day by day and harder to beat Google, but it does however means that a good content has a better chance to rank high - by their sheer virtue of in depth information. To rank high in the search engine results, you must create helpful, valuable, relevant content. That’s it!