37 awesome factors for SEO success

Almost everyone wants to get to the first position on Google search.

It's a dream for most of the business owners and SEO professionals. 

Is it easy? 

No.

Can it be achieved? 

Yes.

How exactly can someone do it?

Simple. Follow the following set of SEO factors.

1. Quality content - Have a thematic flow of information between the page title, meta description, H1, H2 and H3 along with the overall content on the page. The content should add value to the reader + there should be executable insights which others can use right away.
2. Research - Do proper research market research and validate your conclusions or findings. Read this blog on Market research - https://chaitanyaacv.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-to-do-market-research-in-age-of.html for more information. You can use that or your own research methodology. Neatly done research right can help uplift your content's performance. 
3. Words/Phrases - Use the right words or phrases based on the topic. Unless there is a search volume for the words you are writing about, there is really not much point in that content. 
4. Freshness & Relevancy - Google values the relevancy of your content. And often updated, latest content is given more priority than the information that has been there just like that for a long time. Also, writing about trending - hot - topics helps. 
5. Mobile-friendly content formats - Mobile traffic accounts for over 65% of the overall web traffic. Logically, your content should be suitable for mobile-oriented consumption or in vertical. So make your visuals in portrait or square formats. 
6. Answer - Try to answer direct questions from the search queries on the internet. This provides your content with a boost. Users are searching for more and more question-driven queries. 
7. Depth of the content - There are all kinds of readers on the internet. Some like to get to the point fast and get on with their work. While some want to get a full understanding of the concept and then move on. So my suggestion is to write for all kinds of users. Showcase your quick insights at the top. And let your in-depth research be explained in the later parts of your content page. 
8. Crawlability - Search engines use spiders or bots to crawl through your website and index your content to show for related searches. Most SEOs don't focus on is the level of indexation of their website they are enjoying with Google. In many cases, because your good content is not in the index of Google, you are not even visible in search results. Checking this should be regular and mandatory.
9. Duplicate content - The other most common problem with most websites is the amount of duplicate content within their website and their competitor websites. If you have a lot of similar information, then keyword cannibalization will happen. If you have a lot of content from other websites or competitors, then the chances of your content on Google search goes down.
10. Mobile-friendliness - Ensure that your website has all the pages in the mobile version as well and works across all kinds of mobile devices. 
11. Pagespeed - It is highly recommended to keep page load times to be under 2 seconds. There are many sites and blogs which have achieved 0.5 seconds as their load time. 
12. URL Structure - The URL structure should make sense to humans and search engine bots as well. Following a simple and easy to follow a family tree structure with relevant keywords in them. Making the URLs easy to remember and navigate. Eventually, this increases the chances of conversion. 
13. HTTPS - It is a commonly known and well-accepted fact that having a valid SSL certificate for your website gives it a ranking boost.
14. Cloaking - Try to avoid the practice of showing different content to search engines and different content to humans. 
15. Titles - Titles are the primary most element in SEO. Try to make them highly relevant to your webpage and also have relevant primary keywords used in them.
16. Meta Description - This is the second key element in SEO. It is a 2 liner summary of the entire webpage. Can have or not have the primary keywords in it. In most cases, it is made up of entirely secondary or tertiary keywords (related or synonym keywords).
17. Structured Data - I recently read this blog post on The history of Schema. It is an excellent read. The article explains how by adding structure data code on a website helps both search engines and webmasters to better communicate their content to users searching for it. So visit https://schema.org/ and implement all the relevant schemas for your website content. The more, the better it will get. 
18. Headings - Header tags are the third most crucial element in SEO. Your different header tags should communicate the essence of each content they are heading. Having relevant keywords in them can also help deliver extraordinary results. In some cases, Header tags are used for Questions in the Q&A section. 
19. Keyword stuffing - Stuffing keywords into page content is an age-old technique. It is both wrong and practically useless in terms of SEO value. The best-case scenario is having original high-quality content written in a manner that it can actually help the reader. 
20. Hidden Content - There are some website owners have content hidden in their content to rank for a particular search phrase. For example, if someone wanted to rank for the phrase best cars for parents in 2020. Having that phrase written over 20 times in white font colour on a white background page to rank for it is considered to be hidden content. The purpose of such a tactic is to trick search engines into ranking the webpage for the search phrase. There are other ways too of hiding content, majorly by the design of the webpage and the elements on it. This tactic is to be avoided at all costs. The negative impact is far more than the gains in rankings. 
21. Authority - A website's authority is decided by the number of "do" links, shares, author profiles and many other factors. Here's a list of such factors: Specific to domains - Age, trust, popularity, relevancy. Specific to individual pages on the website - Age & trust, amount of value received from links over time, the freshness of the last update, overall relevancy of the page. Specific to link authority - link ratio - do follow to no follow, "domain authority" of the linking websites, the total number of links to the page and the number of outgoing links. In a nutshell, all these combined with author page validation for your content can take your website to the next level. 
22. Engagement metrics - Google search is also a website. Like other websites, it too can see how fast users are coming back to its search results after visiting one of them. This is one way it understands the engagement level of your website for the search query - bounce + time spent on the page. So try to have helpful, relatable and executable content on your webpages. In many cases having an audio or video embed can also help improve the engagement of the users.
23. History - Things once uploaded to the internet leave a mark and cannot be completely wiped away. Similarly, having a website true to its content themes and purpose over a considerable amount of time is useful for rankings. 
24. Identity - Validating a company's authenticity, the people involved and linking back to their active social media profiles, is good enough to prove your identity online. Listing Google My Business verified physical addresses on the maps on a contact us page too helps. 
25. Piracy - If you have ever hosted pirated content on your website, then, of course, it is going to be tough to rank on search. 
26. Ads on the website - If your content is ad-heavy, especially, in above the fold area. The user experience will not be good, resulting in a very high bounce rate. 
27. Link quality - A general thumb rule is not to have over 100 links in a single page. Similarly inbound link quality is to be assessed as well. Having links from websites which have a good spread of domain authority from low to high is essential. Most of the links should have domain authority above the website's own domain authority. 
28. Anchor text - The text used for linking to your internal and external pages has to be highly relevant to the content. This has two benefits. First is that your pages will soon start ranking for the keywords in your link anchor text. Secondly, if you had linked to other websites with very relevant anchor text, trust is built, engagement levels improve. 
29. The number of links - If there are over 100+ do-follow links to a page from few domains, then it gets flagged as spam. So it is necessary to maintain a consistent number of links to websites ratio. 
30. Paid links - Paid links are not really beneficial in terms of gaining ranking success. 
31. Spam - There is this rampant practice of guest comments on blog posts linking back to websites. Most of them are spam and not in the least helpful. There are other kinds of spam on maps, social media platforms, etc. Such practices have to be avoided at all costs. 
32. Country - The country of residence for the website's business dealings. This can be set in the target country option in Google search console. 
33. The locality - This is the local area where the business is situated or operates in. 
34. Known historical traffic - Is the website a popular one and having direct traffic?
35. Social media clout - Does the website have many followers and related people who could become visitors?
36. Reputation - Are there any influencers or people with the relevant following on social media recommending your website?
37. Shares - How many people share your content and genuinely appreciate it?

Hope these help!