As we have progressed with technologies and AI. Other areas of the internet are also directly affected, mainly SEO. If you want to rank on the first page of Google, you must focus on multiple SEO factors of your website in 2024. Here we have tried to list 9 important factors which directly affect your website’s SEO.
How Does SEO Work?
Before getting into the actual details of which SEO factors are important in 2024. Let us first briefly understand how Google ranks your website. This will provide background information on why the later factors are important.
The first step to the ranking is Google finding your website. Once Google finds the information on where to look. The bots known as spiders are run through the link provided. The work of spiders is to extract the links and analyze the markup of your website.
After successfully crawling your website Google uses its highly sophisticated algorithm to analyze the contents from previous steps. The algorithm puts your data against the already existing data to identify where your site belongs in the web of links. If you’re looking to enhance your site’s visibility and gain website promotion, services like Subscriberz.com offer effective solutions to increase your online presence.
Once that is figured out it gives your link a quantifiable number. This will later be used as user queries for something on google. Google presents the result based on the information it previously collected about everything on the topic searched through the “Keywords“.
Let us now look at the list of important factors that directly affect SEO in 2024.
Factor #1: The Use of HTTPS
Gone are the days of insecure connections on the web. The early HTTP days were the norm on the internet and HTTP is over. It is due to issues in HTTP and security advancements. HTTP websites are considered to be of low quality.
As everyone is focused on creating a secure web. And with it, there has been the introduction of Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit organization. Let’s Encrypt provides free SSL certificates to anyone without any cost. Most providers have it on their cPanel, check yours now to find out.
Why is HTTPS a necessity?
So why is HTTPS one of the most important SEO factors in 2024? Anyone who is viewing the site must be fully secure against the vulnerabilities. And the site’s owner need to protect its users. Search engines function on this principle and have made it a major thing for ranking these days.
And you might have heard the term hijacking and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. If you are surfing over an insecure network and also submitting sensitive content through it. You are very much likely to be hacked, everything being transmitted is completely visible to everyone with enough technical knowledge. For this reason, an owner must always use HTTPS and a visitor must always ensure the site is protected before sending sensitive information.
But Wait There’s More
HTTPS makes a website secure, as long as the connection is legitimate. Now, what we mean by that is, if you see a lock icon on your address bar, the site is secure. Click on it to find out the status of the connection. And to verify that you are connected to the right server without any MITM.
A fully secure website will show “Connection is secure” when you click on the lock. But if you are not warned, information is displayed. Because SSL certificates can also be crafted manually and used. There are rare cases of this but they are not uncommon even for legitimate use.
And the SEO ranking is highly dependent on this factor as well. Google will not rank the websites which are not secure. Because it greatly affects the user experience and Google is here to provide a great user experience.
Factor #2: Optimize Website For Smartphones
This is the year 2024 when most people use mobile for their web browsing activity. And this key factor is recognized by search engines. They stand by the mobile-first approach for any website. If your website is optimized for mobile, congratulations. You are already on your way to ranking higher.
The chances of you being ranked higher in search results are also dependent on the mobile optimizations for your website.
Why Is Mobile Friendliness A Factor?
This is a good question to ask if you are just starting with SEO. With the number of mobile devices in the world right now everyone has at least owns 2 devices out of which mobile is at least 1.
Since we do not always carry our laptops with us. Our to-go device for the web is a smartphone. Now smartphones can be anything from simple mobile handsets to (x)pads.
How Can I Adapt To The Mobile First Approach?
In 2024, it’s not enough to look at desktop SEO factors but to focus on mobile too. Well, for starters this has to be done during the development of the website. If you are from a nontechnical background and are using CMS like WordPress for managing your blog/website. There are premium themes that are highly optimized for SEO. All you have to do is read their documentation and ask in forums.
If you know programming and other technical things you can look into CSS media queries for optimizing your website. You can find the specifications and also great tutorials on how to achieve a mobile-first approach.
Factor #3: Quality of Your Content
Yes, Google’s SEO algorithm now even analyzes the quality of the content you provide. If you have lower-quality content chances are you will likely not appear on search results. The quality has multiple factors such as originality, plagiarism, and content value.
The content you put out must not be plagiarized from any other sites. You have to create your content, you cannot just copy and modify the content for getting ranked on Google.
Let us face it, visitors are the main components of any website. You want them to come back to you for much more reading. Even if you rank on the first page of Google but you have no beneficial content for your visitors. Sooner or later you are going to get moved to the last.
It is because the visitor just doesn’t want to visit your site because of the content you provide. You should always prioritize your visitor’s needs and provide as much detail in your content as possible. This will result in user engagement because if the visitor finds every bit of information on your website they will not have to go anywhere else for content.
These things make you an original writer with valuable content. It will ultimately help your users to come back to you in the long run. Because they have now recognized you as an authentic writer who provides quality content.
Exactly this factor is taken into consideration by search engines. And they rank your website based on the value of the content you produce. Which when mixed with other factors will help you rank higher on Google.
Factor #4: Website Speed
Image Source: PAUL SMITH
The speed of a website is one of the important factors which will affect SEO rankings on Google in 2024. Because the web has evolved in the past 25 years, and the advancement of technology has made people familiar with speed.
Nobody likes the pages that load slowly with decent internet connections. This is true for every user on the internet because even we cannot stand slow page speeds. The website owner has to optimize their website for faster loading.
Google itself has even pointed out that speed is one of the various factors that affect SEO in 2024.
Google examines the loading of the first byte from your website to determine the speed of the connection. It is for their internal workings because they spend time crawling your website, (spiders).
If the site is slow the cost of crawling the site is greater. The servers have to spend more time waiting to analyze your content. Which can be quite costly for Google. Hence, it affects SEO negatively while indexing is being carried out.
How To Measure Page Speed?
We have talked much about how page speed affects SEO but we have not given any ways to determine the speed of your page. Well, everything has a time and now the time has come.
There are multiple ways you can determine your website’s speed. The most popular is Google’s PageSpeed Insights. You can head over to that website and determine the speed of your website.
You can view the results and see the things that might be affecting your website’s speed. Work on those and you might just crank up your loading speed drastically. Read to find out how you can increase page speed.
How To Increase Page Speed?
Now that we know how to measure the website’s speed. Let us look at ways to improve our website’s speed. These are all just technical bits, if you are not familiar you might want to google around a bit to understand the concepts.
Let us look at the topics one by one.
Gzip compression
All the contents from servers are served over the network. Sometimes the contents of each request for HTML, JS, or CSS might be too much (> 500 KB). Well, this is a problem even for the modern internet. Because now the server has to send out KB of data which can be just compressed.
Browsers are capable of decompressing the gzip compression. Hence you should always use your server’s capability to compress the files before responding to any requests.
Minify HTML, CSS & JS
Another thing to watch out for is the contents of the files themselves. There is a lot of noise that will not be rendered by the browser for the user’s UI. Such as comments and spaces ( yes browsers render multiple HTML white spaces as one white-spaces character).
The contents of the files should be made compact because in a production environment no one is going to inspect all the codes. All everyone cares about is the result of development. Therefore, the contents must be minimized to save bandwidth and reduce load time.
Optimize Images
The most important part of the website is the images. If they are not handled properly it can cause the page to load painfully slowly. Images must not be used at their full resolution, they must be compressed to a suitable size instead.
The most web-friendly format is WebP, but be cautious about the fact that all browsers do not support this format. You can keep the size of the image between 100 – 200 KB for most use cases.
Disable the Use Of Render-Blocking JavaScript
Browsers when they receive HTML content, they parse it. Parsing means identifying what goes where. In the process, if the browser finds any JavaScript, the JavaScript is parsed first. Which makes the site look slow even though it is very fast.
Therefore, the best advice is to remove/move the code from the head section to the end of the body section. It will slightly improve the performance.
Server response time
Out of all the SEO factors in 2024, this has a direct impact. And the server response time is affected by multiple factors. The factors are the total number of visitors you’re getting, the hosting provider you choose, and the location of servers on the globe.
Hence, choosing the best hosting provider might drastically improve the performance. Server response time isn’t something you can control but the hosting provider is something you can.
Factor #5: Age of Domain
This might look a little bit ridiculous, but it’s true, somewhat. Google’s algorithms do not prioritize fresh domains, and that’s a myth. But as you age more you are more trusted because you have much more content. Because well, if you’ve been in the game for so long you must be writing legit content.
Aside from the assumption, let’s be clear that age doesn’t alter SEO. But, there is one more thing. If you have an old domain, you will have more content. This means, your visitors will have a sense of trust in your content.
And if they find a good amount of content on your website they will not be looking anywhere else for anything. Hence, it is one indirect factor for ranking on Google. Because, the greater the engagement, the less the need for SEO.
If your visitors are visiting you directly now and then then you have already built trust with them. Meaning they will directly follow your website for related things and are not dependent on SEO.
This might look a little off but creating trust from visitors is one of the most important SEO factors in 2024. Because there are a great number of websites and well-optimized content on the web. You want to build a brand through SEO.
The bottom line, though it doesn’t directly affect SEO with age if you keep up maintaining quality content. It will build you a great visitor base and it will be helpful.
Factor #6: Length of Content
This is yet another factor that directly affects SEO. You might ask how? Continue reading to find more insight into what might be the case for this signal.
Google has tremendously advanced its algorithm which determines how one might rank higher in the search results. We have already mentioned the quality of your content but the length of your content will also greatly affect your SEO in 2024. Let us face it, having unoriginal long content will hurt your SEO.
But on the other hand, if you have quality content and the length of the content is between 2,000 to 3,000 words, that’s superb. Your content will be consistently analyzed and ranked higher in SEO results.
Why Is Content Length Important?
Now you might be thinking what’s the fuss with the length of content? Nobody wants to go to a site that provides only a partial length. And most importantly nobody wants a site that provides surface knowledge about the topic.
Hence, creating content of quality and length greatly affects SEO.
How To Write Better Content?
Now, this is a subjective question. It doesn’t have one straight answer. But here’s a generic tip that might help you write content with great length.
Before you get into writing about any topic, you should thoroughly research it first. Organize your content into multiple headings and paragraphs. Is there something related to the concepts presented?
Research more to find out about it, if yes include your findings. And once you have gathered all the related information about a topic you have it. Ultimately the resulting content will have a great length and quality, depending on the seriousness of your research.
Factor #7: Backlinks Are Important
Image Source: Rawpixel
One of the other important factors which affect SEO in 2024 is backlinks. This is one of the prominent factors which are the building blocks of SEO. Why do you ask? Let us elaborate.
Google among its other factors is greatly dependent on the links spread over the web. There are sites with higher Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA).
These two are the concepts that affect your site’s ranking. A domain or page with higher authority is more trusted among the sites presented on the web.
Always go for quality over quantity search for websites with quality where you can leave your site’s link which will act as a backlink.
How To Build Backlinks?
This is not a tutorial or a silver bullet on how to build backlinks. But, there is always a generic thing about backlinks.
The most important thing about backlinks is that you have to reference yourself from nonspam sources. Do you ever see some comments appearing about some kind of medicine on your website? Yeah, that’s spam no doubt, and might be some kind of bot.
But you should read other people’s related blogs and leave comments with your website’s link on the website field. Not on the comment itself, though you might do that it looks like spam.
Another way is to do some form of a guest post on a fairly relevant website. This strategy will not immediately reflect but will have a great impact in the long run.
So, those are the few generic things that might help you build quality backlinks. Oh, and all the backlinks are not considered of equal quality or even quality.
Factor #8: User Experience (UX)
User experience is something that must be a priority not only for SEO but for visitors. Because visitors are the main components of your website. You are focusing on the factors that affect SEO in 2024 because you want to attract more visitors, right?
But as we are aware Google is using its AI to help rank websites on its search engine. So the user experience is something that must not be overlooked. There are various SEO factors that the UX affects such as CPC, User Engagement, etc.
What Are The Areas Of UX?
To answer that question we have to understand multiple things. The UX is directly related to the user hence UI is one major component of UX.
But there are others as well. Such as the website loading time, ease of access, user-friendly menu placement, and proper breaking down of topics into suitable headings and subheadings.
Those are just some general areas that are related to UX.
In short, nobody wants to use an unusable website even though it has great content. You have to focus on the usability of the website along with the quality of the content put out.
So you better research more on the things that fall in the category of UX. And then improve the UX to gain more users and have them engaged in your writing.
Factor #9: Hyperlinks
The last but important factor which affects SEO is links. Well, basically the links are the building blocks of the world wide web (WWW). Everything in the WWW just links in one form or the other.
There are basically 3 kinds of links on a website.
- The links which point to your websites. Can also be referred to as backlinks ( or inbound links ). We have already talked about the backlinks in the above section.
- The next one is the outbound link, which is the link that goes out to other websites from your own. Either as a source or a reference or simply like an advertisement that you put out.
- The final one is the internal links. You link your content from your site’s page. Make no mistake, links like this have a great effect on the SEO of your website. You need to put as many as you can to make your presence more on the web.
Make sure you link enough related content in your website to one another. Because you want to engage the user in your website as much as you can. Once the user leaves your website they might never return if you don’t have enough content.
Now that we’ve gone over the most important SEO factors of 2024, you can apply these concepts to your website and rank higher on search engines. This will help you achieve your goals and reach your audience more effectively, allowing your business to thrive.
