Apparently, Google uses about 200 factors to rank a site. This can seem intimidating for those who just launched their website and are looking for ways to improve their search engine ranking. But here’s the catch. Not all of these factors do affect your SEO ranking. In fact, some of them are nothing but speculations.
As a business owner and digital marketer, it pays to pay attention to the things that really matter.
Here are 4 factors that do not directly affect your search engine ranking.
Social media presence
We all know how powerful social media is in reaching out to your audience. We’ve seen several articles circulating online suggesting that social media is the new SEO. While social media can help drive traffic to your site, it does not in any way affect your search engine rankings.
Let’s say your blog post garnered 20,000 Facebook shares. This will help increase your online presence, brand awareness and even boost your site traffic, which is a good thing. Social media can help your business in a lot of ways, but boosting your search engine ranking isn’t one of them.
Repetitive use of keyword
Most people would use the keyword throughout the content in the hopes of improving their search engine ranking. It helps to incorporate the keyword into your content as seamlessly as possible. However, overusing organic keywords can be a bad thing.
The goal of creating content is to attract readers. Google will reward your site if you publish good quality, informative and relevant content. But if you try to incorporate too much keyword into your content, your articles may end up painful to read. Your content will suffer. This can negatively affect your SEO ranking.
Paid advertising
A lot of people think that they’d rank better in search engines, Google in particular, if they carry Google Adsense Advertising. This makes sense given that Google would make more money when people click the ads. But that’s not how it works.
While paid advertising can help drive traffic to your website, it doesn’t have a direct impact on your search engine ranking. The decision not to use Google Adsense will not harm or hurt your rankings.
The age of your website
Google doesn’t really care whether you built your website in 1999 or in 2016. The only thing Google cares about is how your content helps people. If you built your website more than a decade ago and it’s still running up to the present time, chance are you’ve already built a lot of authority, links, and equity.
Just because you created your website 2 years ago, it doesn’t mean that the older site would perform better. If you have reached the same status and have built the same authority, links, and equity, there’s a good chance that Google would reward your site even more. Why? It’s because you achieved all that within a short period of time.
