Which SEO factors influence search engines?

Optimizing your site generally SEOAce involves three key focus areas: On-page, off-page and technical SEO.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing your website contents so search engines and humans can easily digest it. Technical SEO is any sufficient technical action undertaken with the intent of improving search results, usually through making your site function efficiently. Off-page SEO involves actions taken outside of your website to impact your rankings.

Together they combine to create a solid foundation to enable you to reach your target audience.

On-page SEO
Investing in SEO includes engaging in customer research, market research, and keyword research so that your content reflects the language real people use to search for whatever your website offers. The findings of your research can then be incorporated into your optimization of multiple elements of your website and its pages, including but not limited to:

Domain names

Page URLs

Page titles

Headers

Technical SEO
To ensure that your website can be properly indexed and crawled by search engines and properly used by people, technical SEO includes, but is not limited to, management of all of the following elements:

Analytics setup

Site crawling

Indexing status

Robots.txt status

Canonicalization

Off-page SEO
To ensure that your digital assets achieve maximum visibility in the search engines, meet your goals for relevant traffic, and deliver the conversions you seek, off-page SEO can basically be defined as a practice for bringing attention to your content. Your options for pursuing this include, but aren’t limited to:

Earning links and citations from high quality third-party sites via the merit of your content

Managing link disavowal

Proactively building links and citations from high quality third-party sites via outreach to those publications

Engaging in a variety of forms of online promotion, including social media marketing, being featured as a guest on third-party blogs, podcasts, and vlogs

What are the top organic search ranking factors?

Over the past few decades, SEO professionals have made many ongoing efforts to identify as many of Google’s proprietary organic rankings factors as possible, and to attempt to organize them in the order by which they appear to influence rankings. The same has been done for search engines like Bing, and for some years, Moz conducted a major organic ranking factors survey as well as a local search ranking factors survey. A list of such factors could include, but not be limited to:

On-page factors

User behavior factors

Link factors

Core update factors

Local guidelines factors

Spam factors

E-E-A-T
There are also the elements known as Google’s E-E-A-T factors, which, while not considered traditional, direct ranking factors by many SEOs, are a set of principles which Google instructs its quality raters to evaluate in measuring search engine results quality. E-E-A-T factors can be defined as:

Experience – Is published content based on the first hand-experience of its author? For example, if someone writes a review of a restaurant, did they demonstrably visit the place and try the food. Or, if an influencer is recommending a brand of shampoo, did they actually use it on their own hair?

Expertise – Is published content created by someone who has become skilled in the subject they are covering? For your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) topics like medical information or financial advice, does the author have degrees, licenses, accreditations? For other categories of information, like do-it-yourself home repairs, has the author accrued practical, everyday expertise through demonstrable experience?

Authoritativeness – Do third parties recognize the expertise of a source? Do established authoritative sites and people link to and cite the content in question, as in the case of a well-known food critic linking to their choice of the best Thai restaurant in Seattle, recognizing its expertise in this field.?

Trustworthiness – Is content factual and accurate, are websites and transactions secure and built on the principles of good user experience (UX), is contact information accessible and true, are policies accessible and appropriate, and does public sentiment (like reviews) indicate that a business is above-board and legitimate? Google calls trustworthiness the most important of all the E–E-A-T factors.