How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking, & More

These platforms allow you to analyze keyword performance and track your search visibility effectively. For checking your site’s SEO ranking, consider tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, and Serpple. These platforms offer features to track keyword performance and monitor changes in your site’s visibility.

The “regular” organic search results are the “ten blue links” that we’re all familiar with. Search engine optimization works by optimizing the above buckets to meet search engine best practices. Search engine optimization uses how search works to optimize a site for organic search results. If you’re curious to learn more about Google and its impact on SEO, check out our timeline of Google algorithm updates.

Build High-Quality Citations and Backlinks

You can also consider dedicated rank trackers and various third-party SEO tools to enhance your tracking capabilities. Here’s an analysis by Backlinko that shows that having a keyword in the title tag is proportional to higher SERP rankings. When you use structured data, you can get your pages to appear as rich snippets on the Google search results page. You also stand a chance to rank in the featured snippets, which are the first search result for a search query.

SEO is constantly evolving, but some ranking factors remain at the core of successful strategies in 2025. Focusing on these areas will help you improve your search rankings and enhance the overall user experience, driving more traffic and increasing conversions. High-quality backlinks are one of the most important factors for improving a website’s search engine ranking. These are links from reputable, authoritative websites that are relevant to your content.

• Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content, which is otherwise accessible to search engines.
• SEO experts used to closely monitor ranking positions, clicks, website traffic and stats like bounce rates.
• I track organic traffic to know how many users visit my site from unpaid search results.
• Considering that Google’s index is now mobile-first, you definitely want to make sure that your site is easy to use on mobile devices.

Before we hit our top 10 ranking factors, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about monitoring and tracking ranking. While it is not advisable to ignore any or all of them, dealing with 200 SEO ranking factors can be overwhelming, to say the least. Heading tags are no longer ranking factors 2003-style when they used to be absolutely necessary. But, heading elements remain important for communicating what a web page is about.

He writes/tweets about Google ranking signals, SEO best practices, experiments, tactics, and industry updates. At Moz, we’ve seen sites use similar tactics only to watch their bounce rate skyrocket, and their rankings drop. In fact, there’s anecdotal evidence of sites being hit by Panda after introducing similar barriers. Imagine if you will, a site that requires registration to view any content, which is otherwise accessible to search engines. We’ve talked for years about making your site more accessible for both search robots and humans, but we rarely discuss how those usability factors affect rankings. So after you do the work of ranking, you have to work to keep it there.

Use Contextual Links

A recent study by SEMrush found that backlinks were strongly correlated with higher Google rankings. But if you’re willing to publish amazing stuff, you have a good shot of ranking in Google for your target keywords. That said, you don’t just want to add a bunch of random internal links. Yes, random internal linking is probably better than no internal linking at all.

While Google SEO Anomaly uses hundreds of ranking signals, not all carry the same weight. The focus is on expertise, trustworthiness, user experience, and content quality. The website ranking factors primarily focused on content relevance and quality, user experience, link profiles, mobile-friendliness, and technical SEO parameters. However, search engines continually update their algorithms to provide users with the best search results and keep pace with technological and behavioral changes. By understanding and catering to the search intent of your target keywords, you align your content with the needs and expectations of your audience. Remember, the goal of SEO is not just to drive traffic but to drive the right kind of organic search traffic by providing value that matches the users’ search intent.

The many factors that can affect rankings in the local pack (AKA Google Local Finder) are some of the most critical to local businesses, so any shifts in importance must be closely monitored. At Whitespark’s Local Search Summit in September 2020, Darren Shaw announced the initial findings of his latest Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It is not only important how high a video ranks, the keywords take also care of where they rank and on which topic.