Organic search results are the goal for your SEO efforts and it’s likely the greatest source of your site’s traffic. But with Google’s algorithm constantly changing and updating, it’s difficult to know what to do.

Searchmetrics conducted an analysis of the top 30 placements for 10,000 keywords and discovered three common factors for the pages that ranked highest in Google.

Quality Content

Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. It is also a poor strategy to target a certain keyword density within your content. It is more important to provide relevant, high-quality content that is easy to understand and provides a comprehensive explanation of the topic.

In fact, the average word count on the top ranking pages increased by 25 percent from 2014. Another factor that is weighing heavily today is the Flesch readability of the content, which measures how easy or difficult it is to read an article. Longer quality content comes from an in-depth and comprehensive explanation of the topic at hand that not only delves deeper into the subject, but is also clear and easy to understand. Continue reading →

It is common knowledge that the speed of which a webpage is able to load into a user’s browser can affect everything from user experience to placement in the search engines. But speed is only one variable of hundreds, if not thousands, that are taken into consideration by the search engines.

There are many influencing factors for your site’s placement in the search engines and the more you know, the closer you can come to developing a strategy to raise your site’s position. The problem is trying to determine what is currently keeping your site from performing better.

However, there are three recent developments in Google’s algorithms that may provide an excellent place to start and deserve to be part of your optimization efforts.

Locale-Aware Crawling

Google has recently announced the introduction of locale-aware crawl configurations for websites that return different content based on the perceived country or preferred language of the visitor.

Because Google uses a default IP address from the US, some content may not get indexed. Google is now aware of sites that use locale-adaptive content and uses locale-aware crawling in order to index content for searchers from other areas of the world. Continue reading →