Google says these are the top 3 SEO factors

Google is notoriously tight-lipped about how website owners can climb to the top of the rankings and often provides very little information about its own ranking factors. However, earlier this week on the Google SEO Myth Busters show, Webmaster Trends Analyst Martin Splitt shared the top 3 SEO factors to focus on. He also answered a question about relevance, giving even more useful insight to anyone keen to improve their web site’s search engine visibility. Here’s what we have learned…

What constitutes relevance? Relevance is an important considering in SEO because it determines whether or not your page is shown to search users. Understanding how this relatively abstract concept is decided has been shrouded in mystery until now.While he didn’t give a hugely detailed answer, Splitt did offer a few words of wisdom, commenting “We have over 200 signals to do so. So we look at things like the title, the meta description, the actual content that you’ve got on your page, images, links… All sorts of things. It’s a very complicated question to answer what ranks you best, but yeah… we look at a bunch of signals.” The takeaway from this is that every element of your page is important and speaks to relevance – including multi-media content, links and of course the text itself. It’s interesting that meta description is added here as it’s long been confirmed that meta description isn’t an SEO ranking factor. However, Google does say that it should be unique and descriptive of the page it’s attached to so if you haven’t yet completed this for each page of your new website design, now would be a good time to do so. The 3 most important SEO factors #1 Content It’s no real surprise that content should be an SEO priority and is one of Google’s top three considerations. Within that however, the content must be good, relevant and crucially, serve a purpose for the reader. How that purpose is served will differ depending on page type. A product page for example should have content that describes the product, what it does and how it works. It could also include a product comparison or related products and question and answer style information to serve its purpose of helping the visitor make a purchase decision.Splitt also hinted at the importance of language, saying that the on page content should speak the same language as the visitor. #2 Meta data This is a technical consideration according to Splitt and one that’s the second most important SEO factor to focus on. Here, he advises that you have meta tags to appropriately describe your content. The meta description field is important here, not as a direct SEO ranking factor but because this is the snippet that appears on the search results page. That means it can draw in or put off a user by telling them what your page is about. All pages should have a unique page title which describes the individual page specifically. #3 Performance Google has confirmed page speed as a ranking factor previously and Splitt confirmed this. The more nuanced view of this factor is that having a fast performing site isn’t just good for bolstering search position, it also delivers a much better experience to the user.