Ranking

Ranking Signals or Ranking Factors are a set of characteristics or criteria of a website that search engines use to rank a website in search results. The complete set of ranking signals forms the search engine algorithm. Only Google knows exactly! Google also keeps changing the ranking factors, so you need continuous monitoring of your site SEO. Experience and a lot of testing give SEO experts a good enough idea of the way the algorithm’s work.

XML sitemaps help search engines crawl a site better. Here’s a quickie on all you need to know about sitemaps. The XML sitemap is a file that displays a list of all the URLs that you want to be available to users. In other words, it is a list of URLs in XML format that search engines can easily crawl and index.

Rich snippets can come be confusing for people new to SEO but in this, our latest SEO in 5 minutes article, we set the record straight. The result shown to the user in search results is called a “snippet”. Google search results snippets mostly display the title, meta description, and URL. “Rich Snippets” (sometimes called Rich Results) are snippets where additional data gets displayed. Hence, the name rich results or rich snippets.

Google ranks pages that best fit the keyword, as well as the intent behind a specific search query. If you are not optimized for intent, your keyword-rich content may not help you get the desired results. That’s why your post or page must fit the “search intent” of your audience. Search intent, or User intent, also known as Keyword intent at times, is the reason why users make a specific search query.

Our next article in the WordPress SEO series is on a seemingly simple, but important SEO factor – the Anchor Text. Anchor text is a word or short string of words that are clickable in a hyperlink. It is usually underlined and displayed in a different colour than the surrounding text. Example – if you need to link to this article from another page, you can use the anchor text What is Anchor Text.

Here is the second once on WordPress SEO – Meta Description. The meta description is a short summary (an HTML tag) of about 155 characters of a page’s content. It is the description that gets displayed below the page link when it gets shown in the search results. The main purpose of a meta tag is to get a user to click on it to visit your page.

SEO can be quite overwhelming and stump you at times, and we understand this quite well. We spend all day, every day wrestling with the intricacies of Search Engine Optimization! To help you find your way around SEO, we are starting a new series of articles on WordPress SEO for our readers to help break down SEO and its strategies. Here’s the first one on Image Alt Tags for WordPress.