SEO factors for search engines

Searchmetrics has published an article with the results of an SEO study on the Google ranking factors 2013. The findings are described in the article and compared with those of the previous year. In addition, a more detailed report can be downloaded as a PDF file.

In principle, it is about what distinguishes the pages positioned at the top of Google's organic (i.e. not paid) search rankings from those positioned further back.

Results of the SEO study

The most important findings are:

1. The occurrence of a keyword in the link text or in the domain has drastically lost importance.
2. Other rules seem to apply for well-known brands (and their websites).
3. Social signals have a positive effect on the ranking. (This should be taken with a grain of salt, because a good ranking of a relevant page naturally also generates social signals. The question is: which came first?)
4. Content is king. And quality content at that. A high level of media integration is also very good. (From our own experience, we can confirm that rich content (i.e. text + images + video), for example, ranks significantly better.)
5. Backlinks are still extremely important. However, Google is placing more and more value on their quality.

Sitespeed - How fast does a webpage load?

I also find it interesting that the site speed does not seem to have an effect on its own. In combination with other features, however, it does. Logical: A totally simple HTML page from 1999 loads very quickly. A modern site with various features such as OnePage web design with Parallax Scrolling or similar can of course not keep up with this.

Author images in the search results

I was surprised that author integration should not yet have any influence on the ranking. However, most experts agree that this is very likely to come. The author image is definitely an eye-catcher in the ranking. In addition, according to the latest studies, it leads to increased attention from users.