Recently, Netmark and SearchMetrics published their findings on Google’s top ranking factors of 2013 in hopes of answering questions surrounding Google’s most recent changes to their algorithm.
In the infographic below, Netmark lists the top ten ranking factors from their study that showed the highest correlation to ranking well on Google.
According to the study, on-page factors are far less correlated with Google’s search engine rankings than off-page factors. This means that on-page activity such as keyword count and anchor tags do not hold as much weight as backlink factors linking to the page. For backlinks, the highest correlated factor was the number of domains linking to a page that contain the entire keyword in the anchor text.
By no surprise, social media factors continue to increase in importance for rankings, especially Google +1s. While a simple Facebook share may seem invaluable, creating quality social media posts is now even more critical to the ranking of a website.
As for SearchMetrics, they’ve created a comprehensive infographic detailing their results by social, backlinks, technical, and content.
One of their important findings is that keywords in the URL/domain have significantly decreased as a ranking factor compared to 2012.
Like Netmark’s findings, the study proves that social media is a huge ranking factor. URLs with a high number of likes, shares, tweets and +1s stand out in the top search results, and frequently shared content is increasingly correlated with high rankings.
Quality content will always remain important. SearchMetric’s study says that good ranking URLS seem to have more text and a higher number of additional media integrations compared to 2012, as well as a good internal link structure.
For an in-depth explanation of the findings, take a look at Netmark’s breakdown by backlinks, social media, on-page, authority scores, search volume and ratio and SearchMetric’s top highlights of 2013.
Strategic web marketing is more important than ever to correspond with Google’s ever-changing algorithm!