The Detrimental Factors Influencing Your SERP Positions

Ironically, becoming popular is similar for websites and people. It is necessary to be attractive and friendly, have a good reputation and positive reviews, staying smart while not overcomplicating or seeming too arrogant. These and many other positive features help websites get high ranks from search engines and, eventually, be visited more often. Let’s see now why SERP (Search Engine Result Page) position is important and what can influence it.

Why is the SERP position so important?

Search engines are often the main source of traffic to your website. It is important to stay at the top for one simple reason: most users will never go further than the first three to five pages of search results. A lot of them will hardly even move further than two first pages. What is the use of having a website that is never visited? This is why you need to understand how search engines distribute ranks, which factors can influence your website’s position positively, and which can be absolutely detrimental to its success.

How does search engine ranking work?

After receiving a request from a user, search engines start to analyze websites in their databases to determine the ones that match the request best. Search engines have long lists of criteria with the help of which they determine the quality of websites. In the end, users see search results ranked in a very particular order. Some websites receive a SERP position on the very first page, while others get sorted into the second, third, and further ones. 

Why does it happen so? The rank a website receives among search results depends highly on its relevance to requests. From the point of view of SEO, a relevant website contains well-chosen keywords that are naturally spread throughout texts and match search requests. 

Several external and internal factors determine the relevance of a website.

Internal ones involve the following:

1. Keywords and key phrases are used in headings and meta tags.
2. Keywords are used naturally. It is very important to spread keywords evenly throughout each text and avoid overstuffing. Besides that, texts should be helpful and informative to users, not just made to match search engine criteria. 
3. Keywords are used in the first two paragraphs of a text. Since search bots scan pages from top to bottom, keywords that can be found closer to the beginning of a text piece increase the chances of higher ranks. 
4. Pages are interconnected with the help of internal hyperlinks. 

It is important that you can finetune all these internal things by yourself. External factors that determine the relevance of your website are much harder to bend.

Primary External Factor:

The main external factor that can influence your website’s relevance is link popularity. The more websites that do not belong to you have links to your website, the better reputation it will have with search engines.

Website speed is also taken into account. To find out more about that and how you can improve it, check out this article. If you are curious about the web consumers’ top three pet peeves, click here.