Many companies ignore Search Engine Optimization because they payoff is not apparent immediately and they often do not know what needs to be done to improve their position in the search engines. But it is vital especially for new and smaller companies and there are certain factors that you can work on that will provide a lift.

The three keys to a better ranking in Google are backlinks, page speed and content. A recent study looked at 20 possible ranking factors and determined that five of the twenty were the most important. First was the number of websites that have links to yours. If the number of sites linking to you is high, Google will rank you better. This is classic SEO. It is common to think that the quality of a backlink is important. The quantity is also still very important. While getting links from similar sites is great.

The second big factor in ranking is page speed. This is something that Google has talked about in the past and everyone should be focused on. Try to reduce images sizes, use quality hosting, look for plugins that will reduce the load time, and hire someone to review your site. There are a number of sites also that will show you what is loading slowly on your site and give you suggestions. YSlow, PageSpeed and Pingdom.com are examples.

Your content needs to be wordy. Articles and pages that have  a lot of content rank better. They also tend to get more social shares. The top pages ranked in Google tend to have over 1800 words on them. So increasing the size of your articles is helpful. Also the content needs to focus on just one topic to rank well. The size of an article can also improve bounce rate, another important factor. If a visitor bounces back to Google and finding you in the search, then Google assumes your content is of low quality.

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