HTTPS
Safety first! Always remember this when searching the web. Google honours the use of safety features in which the search algorithm rates the encrypted connection with HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure) as a ranking signal. This gives websites that support this protocol priority in the SERPs.
Current content
Google rankings always aim to provide the maximum benefits for the user. For the crawler to provide the best search results, it has to verify how current a website is and allocate a higher relevance to newer content. The same applies to websites whose content is regularly updated. Google often provides the date of a site’s last update when it presents it in the SERPs, proving the importance of being currently relevant. This doesn’t, however, mean that new or up-to-date content will appear at the top of the search results. Outdated website content can also have high rankings in the results since relevance is just one of over 200 ranking factors.
Text length
The length of a text indicates how in-depth a website goes on certain topics. Long texts are then given higher informative value. SEO experts hypothesise that the text length correlates with the position in the SERPs, but that doesn’t mean that a longer text will automatically be ranked higher.
Uniqueness
Duplicate content offers no value to the user and any that Google finds is classified as irrelevant and devaluated. If duplicate content leads to copyright infringement, you could find your site excluded from the search index. Website owners should therefore make sure that their content is unique. This can prove difficult for e-commerce platforms since their range includes many near-identical product subpages. An elaborate, but efficient solution is to differentiate the pages with product descriptions, but steer clear of just copying existing blocks of text.
PageSpeed
In terms of user-friendliness, Google places a lot of significance on how quickly a site loads. There are two main values: the delivery time of pure HTML pages and the duration of the whole page layout including graphics and other elements such as JavaScript. Since delivery of the HTML page should take place in less than 500 milliseconds, Google specifies a limit of 1.5 seconds for the whole site to load. Anything over this amount is a bad loading time. Reasons for a slow loading time are non-optimised graphics, unnecessary style sheets, too many scripts, or an excessive source code. Since Google considers loading time as a ranking factor, it makes sense to optimise your website in this respect. Google offers the free tool, PageSpeed Insights, which analyses the performance of a website and provides tips on how to optimise it.
Clean HTML coding
An incorrectly programmed HTML code is an indication of a substandard website. SEO experts consider HTML errors as negative ranking factors although there’s no official confirmation from Google on this subject. In order to minimise the risk of devaluation, website owners should strive for clean coding in their HTML pages. One way to check new HTML code for conformity is to make use of the Markup Validation Service from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Mobile friendly
Thus far, a website’s mobile-friendliness just affects the SERPs of a mobile search. Sites that are optimised for smartphone and tablet use rank higher in the mobile device search. For the desktop search, the ‘mobile friendly’ ranking factor doesn’t come into play. Website owners can check how mobile-friendly their site is by using free Google tools.