Over the years anyone wanting to rank their website on Google has attempted to figure out what Google wants. What are they using to decide who ranks, and who does not rank for an organic result on a specific keyword or keyword phrase?
Books have been written on this. Blog posts have been written including a recent update by the popular blogger and Internet marketing expert Brian Dean.
He addresses the 200 Google ranking factors. It makes for great reading if you want to get that deep into it.
http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors
Doing a simple search for Google ranking factors brought up another interesting read on moz.com titled “The Myth of Google’s 200 Ranking Factors”. Written by Gianluca Fiorelli, He refutes the 200 ranking factors and states his case for why there has never been an actual list like this.
Who is right?
More importantly to you, does it even matter?
Let’s get real here. How many of us are going to really do 200 things to help us rank on Google? Most Internet marketers are part time. People like you and me do not have the time it takes to get this deep into ranking on Google.
With such an emphasis on social media, ranking on Google may not even be that important to you. You may want to work that angle and forget about search engine marketing unless you decide to do some pay per click advertising which you can somewhat control.
Here is what I want to do in this post and in a Part 2 article next time. I am going to get more specific on a shorter list that almost anyone can use to get their blog posts ranked. These are realistic, proven, and things you can do right now to help get more traffic to your blog and rank on Google when you want to.
Keywords Matter
Google places a high value on words. This helps them know what your content is about.
Surprisingly most Internet marketers do not target keyword phrases when they put content together.
Why?
Because they do not have a list, and they do not know what Google is looking for. The answer to this is to create a keyword list for your niche and start using the words from it in your blog articles.
So how do you build a real keyword list?
The easiest way is to let Google do it for you, Here are a couple of ideas on that.
1. Google search box.
How you use this to build a keyword list is you enter a keyword phrase and a drop-down menu will appear with other similar keyword phrases that Google says are also searched.
You can try starting with a two word phrase and see what other phrases they give you. Some of them are going to be longer and you can then repeat the process with each of those words individually.
As you build on this you are going to develop a list of keyword phrases and some of those are going to be what are called longtail keyword phrases. These could be two, three, four, five, or even many more keywords somebody searching for.
As the Internet has matured people type in more exact phrases and Google knows exactly what those are. They are willing to share those with you and those are the words you want to put in the articles you are writing for content.
2. Google keyword tool.
You will need to join Google Adwords for free. This then gives you access to the Google keyword tool where you can build lists for various keyword phrases.
The nice thing about the Google keyword tool is they will show you the number of searches being done for each keyword phrase. The more competitive the phrase the harder’s going to be rank for, but certainly you want to include these words on every webpage you are building.
Content
Google is a search engine and the most important thing to them is the content they are delivering to their searchers. This is one reason why some websites that don’t have very many pages can rank over other websites that have many more pages.
The content is important to Google and they are going to increase your rankings based on a couple of factors.
1. Quality of content
They put everybody on notice when they started paying attention to duplicate content. Duplicate content is not quality content that has already been indexed by Google.
What you want to do is create your own unique quality content. This takes more work and is one of the reasons Google will rank you higher over somebody whose content is not quality.
Another thing you can do for quality is include YouTube videos in your content. There’s nothing wrong with going to Google or YouTube and finding a relevant video, copying the embed code, and posting it on your blog post.
Quality content enhances the reader’s experience and Google will reward you with higher rankings when you do that. Beyond videos you can also include audio and graphics which livens up the blog visitor’s experience and increases the quality.
2. Length of articles.
Websites with articles of 1000 to 2000 words are going to rank faster and higher than websites who are using articles of 100 to 500 words. This makes sense because it takes a lot more work to create a long article and many Internet marketers will not do it.
The length of the article also gives you the ability to put more quality into it. This takes more time to research, but it also helps you in writing what is known as themed content.
Themed content is where you’re going to use multiple keyword phrases in one article. This is easier to do on long articles then it is with short articles. Now with more words you give Google a better chance to find you and rank you.
Keywords and quality are two things you have control over when attempting to rank higher on Google. Just know that Google will reward you over time if you focus on these things because you are providing a better experience for their searcher.