There are many factors Google takes into consideration before ranking your blog in its search results. Of all these factors, keywords, links and the age of your site play a major and important role. Google probably uses the concept of fuzzy logic and comes to a final number after calculating all the major factors which it needs to consider before ranking a site or a webpage in its search results. Here is a list of all the factors I have discovered so far which Google checks for at your blog.
- Age Of you blog. We all know that older blogs are considered to be more mature by Google. Even if they do not get updated Google constantly sends traffic to them even if they have less PR.
- On-page optimization factors: how many keywords you have used, your title, your post body, the URL of the post and also the main title of your blog.
- Off-page optimization factors: how many links are pointing to your site. Human behavior of the visitors of your blog. Though link building is not working it still allows you to safely upload links to your recent post to be updated on 3-4 social bookmarking sites.
- How much time your visitor spends on your blog. That is what Google says but I do not find this having a major impact on many sites' Google traffic.
- The reaction of the visitor after they reach your site: do they click ads or do they click other links to find more information or if they have stopped searching and are finding your site to be a site of authority.
- Did the visitor bounce back to the Google results to search for more information? Google wants to see if your blog post has quenched the thirst for information that its visitor had. If that is not the case, Google considers that your post still has to improve.
- This is an important one: the Google Page Rank of your site. After all, Google became well established because of its Page Rank concept which will decide whether a site is an authority site or not.
- How often is the content of your blog changing? The more the content gets uploaded the more Google will start searching for your site.
- Original high quality content. I always wondered why Matt Cutts used to write posts about growing beard and doing different things in the next 30 days! The reason is: that is original content. It might have nothing to do with his blog but he knows that no other intelligent fool is doing the same thing.
- The authority of the sites which are linking to your main page. The Google PR of the sites linking to you.
- The number of links on the indexed page and the number of indexed pages of your site.
- How frequently are the links coming to your site. A few years back a few links were sufficient to get some Google traffic. It is not so at least in the present situation.
- The total number of posts on your site.
- How good is the linking structure of your site.
- How good is the navigation of your site and how far the home page is from every other page on your site.
- Do you have labels on your site? This is considered to be a good way of systematically arranging the data of your site.
- How long has the post been existing in its database. This is very important, old posts can be called as mature and can be trusted to be having good high quality content.
- Have you given links to other useful sites in your niche?
- Your geographical location and also the location of the visitors of your site!
- How many ads you have on your page and so on.
- The sitemap of your blog.