Top 3 Proven SEO Ranking Factors 2016 to Look Out For

In 2016, Digital marketing has evolved in a big way and when we talk about Search Engine Optimization, it’s always been the talk of the town among all business owners and their Webmasters. Everybody know Google search engine algorithms keeps on improving and always focused to provide relevant search result and punishing websites that are involved in wrong practices.

Today, I am going to share my experience and research done on finding 3 proven SEO ranking factors 2016 which will help all business organization to gain Google organic ranking while using 100% ethical SEO practices.

1:  Longer Content Tends To Rank Higher

So, the most important point which Google always suggest and lay importance to is Content. There has been a lot of debate on how many numbers of words we should have on a webpage. According to the detailed research on content, shares, and links: insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles has been conducted by BuzzSumo and MOZ where 10 highest ranking pages have 1200 words and top 30 results pages have to content around 1140 words. Hence, there is no specific limit or any standards which define the minimum amount of words a webpage should have. SEO webmasters & even the business owners rely on online SEO analysis tool which checks real-time HTML to text ratio and advice the ratio should be more than 20%. But, my friend it’s not sufficient! Add more than 1100-1500 words high quality informative and relevant content which serves the detailed information what visitor is looking for, and you will see the difference in your ranking position.

2:  User Signals like Bounce Rate & CTR Impact both Desktop and Mobile Search Results

Google has always keep hiding secrets about user signals like bounce & click data impact on ranking factors. The debate is going on since 2008 and yet again in recent past webmasters are eager to know does Google consider bounce rate as a ranking signal. In March 2016, Google’s Andrey Lipattsev & Moz’s Rand Fishkin were in a Google Q&A via WebPromo hangout – (jump to 14-minute mark) where Audrey wisely refuses to reveal that Google is counting on click data which is also termed as pogosticking. Rand ran some real-time tests and proved that – Yes, Google favors those websites in ranking that have lower bounce rate percentage and equally distributed heat maps click data. So, the conclusion is – focus on improving your bounce rate, CTR and UI/UX. This is a useful article about website high bounce rate which helps to optimize your website in order to achieve higher ranking positions.

3: The Era of Rank Brain(Google’s latest algorithm) has begun and how we can apply it

Back in 2013, Google shared a blog post on learning the meaning behind the words and how machine understands the human search behavior and after so many tests later applied this technique in the form of Rank Brain in last year.

Well if you don’t know yet what Rank Brain, here is the definition – RankBrain is Google’s name for a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that’s used to help process its search results.

Now, the golden question is what exactly we do or implement on our website or in SEO process to get noticed by the Rank Brain Algorithm.

And the answer is – Using the right set of words which we technically call – “keywords” on a webpage is an art. The basic idea behind introducing Rank Brain is to give users fast and accurate results. Google hence, released an open source tool named – “word2vec” which provides an efficient implementation of the continuous words and converts it into their own vector language. You need to understand the inter-relation of words while formulating the webpage content, that’s in a true sense called optimizing webpage content with closer vector points.

For example:

Word2vec uses distributed representations of text to capture similarities among concepts. For example, it understands that Paris and France are related the same way Berlin and Germany are (capital and country), and not the same way Madrid and Italy are.

Conclusion

According to an interview with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt back in 2010, he confirmed that there are almost 200 ranking signals which keep on changing with the course of time. The only important thing is how we present our website to the Google machine and get ahead in the search result.