7 Overlooked Factors In Search Engine Optimization

Fresh content, target keywords, meta description, responsiveness, and Page speed load These are some of the factors in Search Engine Optimization where most online marketers are investing more time and money, to the extent that other factors affecting SEO are being overlooked. Those overlooked factors may not greatly boost your on-site SEO, but if done properly, they will surely help your website reach the top of the search engine results page.

Let’s take a look at these factors.

Site Maps

A site map is simply a list of the pages on your website. It’s like an archive of every webpage’s URL on your website. It tells Google and other search engines about the organization of your site's content.

How Does Your Sitemap Affect Your SEO?

Search engines should see all the pages that you want them to see. The more pages that they index from you, the more trustworthy your website is in the eyes of the bots. It only means that your website has more information to offer, and the more relevant your content is, the higher your ranking will be.

It won’t greatly boost your SEO, but it would definitely help.

Website Security (SSL)

If you’ve been doing some online searches, you may have noticed the small padlock in the address bar that tells you that the website is secure. Secure websites can protect a user’s connection by securing information in three layers:

Encryption ensures that a user’s activity cannot be tracked or their information stolen. Data integrity prevents files from being corrupted as they’re transferred. Authentication protects against attacks and builds user trust.

But how does it affect search engine rankings?

Security has always been "a top priority" for Google. They have taken a strict stance to ensure that they protect the privacy of their consumers. So, in order to implement an advanced secure connection for users, Google, the search engine giant, included HTTPS (Website security) as one of the factors affecting your website rank.

Secured websites attract people because they are less likely to be attacked, which means all communications are protected. This can result in more visitors, which results in a higher rank in the SERP.

With cyber security being such a big consideration these days, it is time to secure all your online assets. It instills credibility, builds brand trust, and enhances SEO.

H1 TAGS

This specific HTML attribute affects how search engines classify the content on your website’s pages. H1 tags often look like section headers, denoting the content in the following paragraph. Search engines use H1 attributes to help determine how specific paragraphs on a web page are classified. Often, I see websites that employ other SEO factors but have neglected to use H1 tags when categorizing their content for search engines. Creating optimized H1 tags is simple; it requires two things: an understanding of the keywords you intend to target and a paragraph of content relevant to those keywords. An H1 tag is no more complex than a precise paragraph title. Once you’ve determined the focus of the content, the H1 tag should adequately reflect it for search engines and visitors.

Img Alt Tags

What is the Purpose of alt Tags?

Alt tags are a text alternative to images when a browser can’t properly render them. Similar to the title, the alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file.

When the image won’t load, you’ll get an image box with the alt tag present in the top left corner. Make sure they fit with the image and make the picture relevant.

How Do They Affect SEO?

Search engines are not humans; they do not view or see images the way that we do. One way we help search engines "see" images is by naming them properly with image filenames and alt text. These function as an image description that helps crawlers "see" the pictures on your site. That is why Google places a relatively high value on alt text to determine not only what is on the image but also the topic of the surrounding text.

Adding appropriate alt tags with relevant keywords to the images on your website (try not to overdo them) can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images.

Furthermore, this is also used for accessibility: visually impaired or blind users use special browsers that read images to them, and image alt text and our file names can be helpful for that. Twitter has this feature.

Internal Links

Link to as many pages on your website as possible, when applicable. Pages that contain a lot of internal links allow web crawlers to better index your website, and the internal anchor links will improve your SEO.

Ever wonder why Wikipedia ranks on the first page for thousands of key terms? Simple: they use internal links all the time.

External Links

Business owners don’t like to link to other websites because they fear that they’ll lose traffic. However, external links to resources and quality content your readers may value do benefit your own page rankings.

When linking to external sources, only link to high-quality sites that you’d like to be associated with and that have a high domain authority and page authority.

Updating Content

We all know Google looks at the freshness of content, right? What if I told you that you don’t have to create content from time to time just to rank well and that there’s a strategy that will help you skyrocket those rankings without a lot of extra work? Sounds Interesting, right? Keep reading to learn more.

Google web crawlers search your site and save the last time a page was updated, placing a higher emphasis on fresh content. By revisiting older blog posts, updating their content, adding relevant images and target keywords, updating the meta description and headline, and changing the publishing date to today, you will make your content fresh.

A website sitemap indicates the last time a piece of content was updated, which is relayed back to Google. When you tell Google your content is new, you’ll get a spike in traffic that will make the tiny amount of work required well worth it.

Yes, you could keep creating more content. But this is complicated, and it takes lots of time. Instead, you can make updates to your old content. It takes less work and delivers faster results.

To learn more about Search Engine Optimization click read our article here.