Google On-Page SEO Ranking Factors For 2015



According to Moz, one of the leaders in SEO and inbound marketing, Google makes at least 500 changes to its search algorithm each year.

The point is, SEO is changing every day.

Gone are the days of link building, keyword stuffing, and black hat SEO tactics. Nowadays, your SEO should focus on content marketing, social SEO, social media engagement, and publishing regular, high quality, fully optimized blog articles on your company website.

There’s an interesting post at WebmasterWorld.com forum about 2015 on-page SEO ranking factors – what matters now and what doesn’t that much. Following is the list based on the original forum post plus the commentators’ opinions.

The On Page SEO Tactics That Matter Now:

  • Never forget your bare-bone On-Page SEO – H1, H2 and title tags
  • User experience metrics (page loading speed, navigation, ease of use, conversion, About & Contact pages, etc)
  • Shorter title tags
  • Original content
  • Engaging content that provides an answer, teaches, informs, is useful, delights
  • Original images
  • Quality site design (It’s more about up-to-date code: Html5, CSS 3, not heavy JS, no flash.)
  • Descriptive meta description
  • Responsive/mobile friendly Design
  • Microdata
From a high level perspective, when creating content, think of what the user types into the search box as a question, and then create optimized, high quality content, that answer that question completely.

The On Page SEO Tactics That Don’t Matter As Much:

  • Keywords
  • Focus on longtail phrases
  • Focus on ranking for specific keyword phrases
  • Lean code
However, one thing I do disagree on are the importance of keywords, still in 2015 and beyond. After all, people will always use keywords and phrases when they are searching. Plus Google spiders will always need to “read” or crawl websites for descriptive metadata and html text, in order to determine the quality of the content on that webpage.

But yes, of-course keywords aren’t as important as they once were - in a keyword stuffing sense.

There is a lot more discussion around what should and should not be on these lists. This is a thread you should spend some time in.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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