15 things you should pay attention to

According to Duane Forrester, the following 15 elements have a positive influence on the rankings of your web pages (if used correctly):

1. Title tags
2. Meta Descriptions
3. Clean URLs
4. Images and Alt descriptions (also called alt tags)
5. H1 tags
6. Rel=Canonical
7. Robots.txt
8. Sitemaps
9. Social sharing options
10. Unique content
11. Depth of content
12. Matching content type to visitor expectations (text, images, video, etc.)
13. Usability Page load times (to a certain point – faster is great, but not at the expense of usability and usefulness)
14. Crawlability (AKA discoverability, so can we actually get to all your content)
15. News – if you are actually a new site, submit for inclusion

All of these elements can contribute to the rankings of your website. However, you should make sure that you use these elements correctly. If you stuff the H1 tags on your website with keywords, this will have a negative effect on your website's rankings. You have to understand why an H1 tag is important to a reader, and learn how to write optimized content for them. Just 'having' a tag in place doesn’t mean that your tags are doing everything they can for you.

How to check this quickly and easily

Check your website with the website audit tool in SEOprofiler to find out if everything is correct. The website audit tool checks titles, image alt tags, duplicate content, click depth, and many more things that make sure that search engines will index your web pages correctly.

After performing a website health check with the website audit tool, use the Top 10 Optimizer in SEOprofiler to analyze the different elements on your web pages. For example, the Top 10 Optimizer will tell you whether your H1 tags are overoptimized or not. The Top 10 Optimizer analyzes many different elements that have a direct influence on the search engine positions of your web pages.

10 things you should avoid

There are several things that can have a negative influence on the rankings of your web pages:

1. Meta Keywords (fill them in if you like, keep it short and relevant, but not a big ranking factor)
2. Duplicate URLs
3. Overly long URLs (no set number, but you’ve all seen these)
4. Cloaking (comes down to your intent, but risky business for sure)
5. Link buying
6. Selling links
7. Link and like farms
8. Three way links
9. Content duplication content
10. Auto following in social media

Just like Google, Bing doesn't want to get cheated. Do not participate in linking schemes and do not buy links, likes or followers.

Use white-hat SEO methods that play by the rules. If you use white-hat SEO methods, you don't have to worry about spam filters and penalties. In addition, you will get high rankings that last.

When it comes to ranking factors, Google and Bing aren't that different. The influence of the factors on the rankings is slightly different but the basic factors are the same. If you want to get high rankings on Google and Bing/Yahoo, optimize your web pages with the help of the tools in SEOprofiler.

With the website audit tool, you can get a detailed website health check for just $1. If you haven't done it yet, create your SEOprofiler account now.


Article by Axandra
SEO software