The Silverback Marketing post for Monday, August 13, 2012 discussed a new signal Google would be using to check the relevancy of your website, the possibility of copyright infringement. The last sentence of paragraph two of the article stated that “Google plans to add this issue to the more than 200 signals it already uses to rank the relevancy of a website.” Some webmasters and web content editors may not realize there are that many signals Google utilizes to determine if a page online should rank well.

Anyone that has spent any time online since 2011 creating and editing pages for a site is well aware of the Panda algorithm Google launched last year and the 2012 Penguin update. Both algorithms seek to ensure relevant content is being posted online and strive to penalize websites that ignore the updates. However, these are just two signals that Google’s spiders focus on when crawling your site. Understanding some of the others is going to be just as important to give your site the best opportunity to rank well on any Google SERP.

• Importance regarding keywords – Keyword stuffing no longer is an asset to your site, but the absence of relevant keywords can also damage the ranking of your website. Google looks to see if pages of your site have important keywords within your title tag and meta description. Google will also verify that the same keyword is not used over and over within the framework of the actual content.
• Proper Grammar – This may not be overly important depending on your audience, but if your audience demands a clean site then taking the time to check proper grammar, punctuation and spelling is an important factor.
• Relevancy – Few if any penalties to your site plus positive reviews from other sites with a good reputation are dynamite ways to help improve your page ranking.
• Social media – Choosing to ignore the importance of social media in the current online world is foolhardy. Therefore, making sure that your website includes links to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter profiles is extremely helpful. The social media strategy is even more beneficial if your Facebook profile possesses a significant number of Likes, your Twitter profile has many Followers and your Friends and Followers take the time to share your content on their profiles. Make sure to have a legitimate LinkedIn profile as well if you want your site to be viewed as a professional business.
• Usage of links – Panda and Penguin has people so concerned about content that they forget the importance of links. Are backlinks coming from sites that the web views as reputable? Are there navigational links that are user friendly? Do backlinks possess more follow than nonfollow attributes? Do more backlinks travel to the root domain than pages on the site? Most important, are there any broken links on your site directing your audience to invalid pages?

Does the online community know every single signal Google uses to rank websites? Probably not, but being well- informed will help you manage your site in the best manner possible. Good luck!