Domain age itself is not necessarily a ranking factor, but typically domains that have been active for a longer period of time tend to rank better. Age itself, is not a ranking factor (source /u/karlmarxthebearr on Reddit)

Once upon a time, this was a key ranking factor. These days having your keyword in your domain name helps, but is a much smaller ranking factor then it used to be.

A domain name that features a keyword at the starts, has an advantage over a domain name that doesn’t.

Legitimate domain names are often paid for years in advance to secure the domain for future use and to ensure no competitor acquires the domain. As where as domains that are only paid for year, by year, could possibly be low quality or spammy websites that add little value to the index.

A Moz domain research document by Rand Fishkin states that by having a particular keyword in a sub domain will help with visibility.

A website with a negative history of negligent owners may have had the domain name penalised or in some cases banned. This penalisation may be carried on when the domain is transferred to a new owner.

Google uses any keywords within a URL to help understand what the page is about. If you have a domain name that exactly matches a keyword, your website may perform a little better when compared to a domain name that doesn’t.

An old SEO myth states that if you had a hidden whoIS, Google might think that you have something to hide, therefore you should receive less visibility. The fact is that’s not true at all and which ever you choose, hiding or showcasing your whoIS information will not affect your rankings. Google is a registrar and will have access to a websites information either way.

If a particular webmaster has been reported for illegal/bad behaviour through their website, there is a chance that Google will log this and limit the opportunity for the website to rank.

By having a country based domain name (.uk, .jp, .it etc) you will have a greater chance of ranking in that particular region. You can also set this in Google search console too!

Adding your keyword into your meta title is important for relevancy signals. It used to be very strong ranking signal, however the strength of that is now a lot less. It is still very important to include the keyword so Google understands what the page is about.

Titles that start with the target keyword will perform a little better than pages that don’t. Again, this is a very, very small ranking and relevancy signal.

Have you ever seen how Google highlights your search query in the SERPs? By having your keyword in the meta description, you will be increasing your relevancy.

The main header (<H1>) is what describes the content of your page, including your keyword within this will increase the relevancy of the page and help with targeting your chosen keyword.

Having keyword phrases in your content increases relevancy, even better if you can include LSI. As a rule of thumb, going above a text ratio of 3% for a single keyword may result in over optimisation. The keyword density algorithm suggests that Google uses a sophisticated Term Frequency- inverse document frequency (TF-IDF).

Pages with more content typically rank better. This is because pages with more content are of a higher quality and give more value to the user.

Having a table of content helps Google to understand your content better and can be included in a rich snippet on the SERP’s. In the link below, a quick study by itsVicky, showcases that there may be a small boost for pages that utilise this.

Latent semantic indexing is a mathematical method that was developed in the 80’s that scans unstructured data and identifies relationships between words. Some believe that search engines employ this method to help understand content on a page and to link relative words together, increasing relevancy.

Others don’t believe in it so much for a number of reasons. The link from SEJ below runs through why it is not worth pursing.

Like using LSI in your main content, it is a good relevancy signal to include it within your headers and meta data when applicable.

A page that covers a topic in detail, with quality and insightful content will typically rank higher.

Page speed has become one of the most important ranking factors at this present time. Google will boost websites that have a fast loading page, especially for the mobile indexing. Rural areas and areas with a slow internet connection benefit from websites that have very little to load.

Google page speed test uses Lighthouse, Chromium and Google Chrome browser data to determine the page speed. In 2018, Google updated its page speed score to utilise Lighthouse, which looks a lot deeper at speed factors. As usual, the quicker the better.

Accelerated Mobile Pages helps news based content to rank better by stripping unnecessary elements to greatly increase page speed.

Entity search is a more accurate way for bots to understand user intent, ensuring relevancy for the content is matched and verified with things such as links. A great post about entities and why they matter is linked below:

The Google Hummingbird update was great for Google to understand content better. It changed its algorithm to really read the page and to determine if the content on show was relative.

Duplicating content, either on your own website or on another, can lower the opportunity for the page to rank. If you have content that is very similar, or has been revisited, to use a canonical redirect to state which is the newer version. It is important to state that there is no specific penalty for duplicate content.

Rel=Canonical tags help Google to understand which content is the most relative or recent if content is very similar. This is important so that you do not get a penalty for duplicate (or similar) content.

File names, alt tags and image meta help Google understand what the image is. This helps to increase relevancy and gives the image a chance to rank within the image search engine.

Since the Google Caffeine update, content that has been newly published may receive a boost in rankings. This was done by Google to help keep keyword types more up to date where applicable and can be seen in the news section, or current event based keywords.

As we have already established, new and fresh content may receive a boost in the search engine rankings. This also applies to pages that are regularly updated as this entices Google bot to keep visiting the page to see if there are any new updates.

Previously updated records can also help with freshness signals. Usually blogs showcase the last time a page was updated and do not record each and every update.

Ensuring that you use your target keyword (or phrase) within your first paragraph can be a small ranking factor. This is because, sometimes Google will use the first paragraph instead of your meta description if it deems it more relevant.

By including your keyword within your page headers (H1, H2, H3) you can increase your content relevancy. This is also a keyword prominence factor as your titles help Google to understand what the content is about.

Like an essay, Google appreciates it when you properly cite your sources and will help with trust signals. Citing established and quality resources will increase the over all quality of your content.

Having your outbound links pointing to the same sources/topic/niche will help Google to understand your content better and will improve relevancy.

Nobody likes a poorly written article. Good grammar and spelling is a quality sign and will improve your read-ability score (a quality signal).

Original content will always rank better than copied content. It is important that if you are re-covering a topic, it is written in a unique manner and if any content is copied, it is cited appropriately.

Since ‘Mobilegeddon’ websites that do not cater to mobile devices will not rank as well as those who do. It was a period where website owners were scrambling to get their websites responsive.

Google checks to see if your website is usable on mobile, issues will be showcased in Google Search Console. Mobile pages that are well designed will have a better chance of ranking higher.

If you are hiding content on mobile to achieve a quicker page speed, keep in mind that the hidden content may not get indexed.

Helpful supplementary content helps a user navigate or understand the page further. Google appreciates this and may give the page a small boost.

Tabbed content can hide your content, making it unreadable, especially if it is coded in .JS. CSS based tabbed content is good to use as Google will be able to read the code. You can find out more in this content written by yours truly!

Having a cookie consent page is now law as part of the GDPR laws set out in the EU. This acts as a trust signal for users and Google.

The more internal links you have pointing to a page, the more important it appears to be. This will be showcased in your page authority.

A page that features relative imagery and videos will see an increase in its quality, helping the user to further engage with the page.

The amount of links pointing to a page will help to determine how important that page is.

The quality of the internal link will give its destination a boost, the higher the authority, the more it will benefit.

Broken links on a website shows that a website is not very healthy and this will cause crawl issues for the website.

Reading level can be at three different levels, basic, intermediate or advanced. It has been noted that Google prefers a more simple reading level as it will be readable by more people.

Too many affiliate links may hurt rankings and lower the quality of the page.

Poor coding can result in a slower page speed and create crawl issues. It will also make the job of Google Bot a lot harder as it will be harder for it to read, lowering the over all quality score of the page.

A website with a higher domain authority score will typically rank higher than one with a lower score. Domain authority is calculated by a number of different factors, to help determine its chances of ranking success.

Similar to Domain Authority, pages with a higher page rank will typically rank higher. Google uses this score to help determine the quality & value of the page. Some say its dead, others think it’s still alive and kicking.

Having a shorter URL can help with users remembering your specific URL as well as having the chance for Google to read and feature the URL, giving you an advantage in the search engine.

A page that is closer to the homepage will have an advantage over a page deep down in the file directory.

Having your pages categorised can help with the relevancy of the page and website as a whole.

Wordpress tags, can help the relevancy of a page by generating relative phrases on the page.

Having your keyword used in the URL  is a small ranking factor based on relevancy.

If a category is present in the URL string, Google will read it and it could act as a relevancy signal.

Citing references and sources is good general practice and helps with relevant outbound links.

Numbered and bullet lists are a great way to help structure your data for both Google and your users. It can also convert to be featured as a rich snippet if the content is relevant.

In your sitemap, you can set the priority of the page (on a scale of 0.0 to 1), this tells Google that it should visit the page more often.

To many outbound links can often be a sign of spam and may devalue the page. It also limits the crawl rate and limit the amount of time the bots look at the page.

If a page is of high quality, has a good amount of LSI and alike, it will rank for more than one keyword.

While Google does like new and fresh content, it does like older content when it is updated regularly and can often outrank fresher pages.

Having a clean, user friendly design for a page will help Google to understand it. Remember, less is more (in terms of design).

Parked domains will receive less visibility as they usually have very little to no content value.

Websites that offer great content through out will be rewarded by Google. This is to encourage continuous quality through out and not just one off good posts.

Contact information featured through out the website will ensure that your website is more legitimate. Standard contact us places to feature are in the footer and a dedicated contact us page.

The more ‘trust’ your website has, the more likely it will be sen more often. This can be measured on certain tools such as Moz or Majestic.

A good website architecture helps to organise your content for Google and will help relevancy. It will also aid Google bot to get to deeper pages quicker, internal linking is key!

Updating your website doesn’t just help to keep things secure but it also promotes crawl rate, ensuring your website is seen more often by Google bot.

Having a sitemap will help to get your pages indexed quicker, which in turn will aid visibility. For the quickest results, submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.

If a website is getting a lot of down time, it may hurt its rank, lowering it’s visibility. If you are getting a lot of down time, check in with your hosting provider.

If your hosting provider is in a different continent or country, it could harm the website if you are a geo specific website. For example, if you have a .co.uk domain name, you would expect your server to also be located in the UK.

HTTPS is a very important ranking signal and will showcase trust towards your website. Google rewards websites with HTTPS by giving it a boost in the rankings.

All major websites have a terms and conditions page with a privacy policy. This acts as a trust signal to Google and the users.

Like duplicate body content, duplicate meta content can harm your visibility because it does not help Google to understand what the page is about.

Breadcrumbs are a great way to conduct effective internal linking, increasing the relevancy of the page and it also helps crawl ability.

Having a mobile optimised website as a whole, is crucial for getting your website included in the mobile index.

While Google can not give YouTube preferential treatment, having video based content is a quality signal and will aid visibility.

A website that is hard to navigate can affect crawl rates and user ability, lowering your over all visibility.

Utilising Google Search Console and Analytics gives webmasters the opportunity to get websites well optimised and indexed quicker. It can also help Google to monitor your website if any issues arise.

Google loves reviews and reviews from trusted sources can help with a websites trust factors and can even be featured in the rich snippets.

Similar to domain age, older and more established backlinks may carry more weight.

The higher number of referring domains you have, the more authority your backlink profile will have. It’s a little bit like a popularity contest with this one.

Having links from a wide range of C-Class IP’s is important to validate the diversity of your referring domains. Too many links from the same C-Class may be a sign that your links are part of a PBN.

Although its not as powerful as the number of referring domains, the more links you have from a single domain is still a ranking factor.

The alt text of a backlink helps Google to understand what the link is about. This adds to the relevancy of the link and can reflect in the SERP’s.

If you have links that are image based, the alt text will help describe not just what the image is about but also what the link is too. This is also a ranking factor.

Having properly cited links from .gov or .edu links can carry more weight. Unfortunately, this has been abused and does not carry as much weight as it once did.

Links obtained from high authority pages will transfer more juice to your own page, helping to increase the authority of the page.

The authority of the referring domain will also help to pass down authority to your own website. The more highly authoritative websites ranking to you, the more authoritative your website (and page) will be.

Links from competitors, or websites that compete with you in the same search engine ranking will help to solidify your ranking.

Links from poor/spammy websites and servers will cause toxic links which can damage your authority. If you have toxic links, you can combat this by submitting a disavow file to Google.

Guest posts are a quick and simple way to acquire new backlinks. These posts do add value, but less so than before (authority dependant).

Backlinks from advertisements do also pass on authority but should really be nofollowed as they are typically not relevant to the content on the linking domain. Adverts are typically live for a short amount of time, so they will be removed after a certain amount of time.

Nofollowed links are not ideal for the average link builder because little authority will pass through it and Google’s bot will avoid it. However, a well placed nofollowed link can generate good referral traffic – so it should not be ignored.

Having a diverse range of links can help to increase visibility. It demonstrates that your website and content are useful for a number of different websites.

Sponsored posts typically hold less value, this was previously determined by the surrounding text of the link, for example “Victory Digital sponsored this post”. Since 2019, Google has introduced rel=sponsored, so links can be easily identified as being sponsored.

Links that are embedded within the main body content are considered more powerful and natural.

Too many 301 redirects to a page may dilute PageRank. This is because over time, chains will form, making the page seem dead. Too many redirects can also cause loading and crawling issues.

Like the anchor text for external links, anchor texts for internal links also send relevancy signals.

The link title (the bit that appears when you hover over a link) is a small relevancy signal and also helps user ability.

Links that come from country specific domains help you rank better in that specific location.

Links that appear at the beginning or the middle of the content will carry more weight when compared to the bottom. This is because the link will be placed in a more prominent position and read first.

Similar to link placement within the content, link placement on the page as a whole is important. Links that are placed in more prominent positions will carry more weight.

A link that has come from a referring domain in the same (or similar) niche will carry more weight as it is more relevant.

A link from a relative page also passes more value. Google loves it when things are relevant and will reward it.

Linking pages that contain your target keyword or phrase will help to increase the relevancy of the link.

A website with a positive link velocity typically sees a positive ranking boost due to popularity from other websites and social media.

On the flip side, a page that is seeing less popularity will receive less visibility.

Links from top resources may be given special treatment.

Links obtained from highly authoritative will carry more weight. Especially when they have been acquired from big branded websites, as these will be very trusted sources.

Even though Wikipedia links are nofollowed, many people still believe that it counts towards your trust score and they can also bring in good referral traffic.

Words associated with your backlink helps Google to understand what your website is about.

Older links will hold more value than newly created backlinks. This is why curated link building services have become somewhat relevant.

In order to combat PBN schemes, Google has started to reward real and established backlinks. Giving more weight to them when compared to ‘splogs’.

It is really important that when you are link building, your backlink profile looks as natural as possible. This is why good content creation is key for link building.

Link exchanging can result in a Google penalty and should not be done, especially when getting involved in link exchange schemes.

Links from 301 redirects do carry weight but not as much as a direct link.

Schema will help Google to understand certain site elements and can increase visibility and build links from directly the search engine rankings.

Trust will be passed on to your website through the link. The more trusted the linking domain is, the more your website will be trusted too.

A page that has hundreds of outbound links will pass less authority on to you when compared to a website with only a few links.

Forum links are considerably less in value as they once were. This is because they are easily created and sculpted.

The word count of the referring page can help to determine the quality of the link. The more words (and content) the better.

The over all quality of the referring page can affect the amount of authority and trust you receive.

Site wide links are condensed, meaning it will have about the same value as a single link.

RankBrain is a Google algorithm that tracks user interactions, which some people believe has an effect on the SERP’s.

Pages that get clicked more often (high CTR) will receive a boost for that keyword. You can track your click through rate on Google Search Console.

The organic click through rate for all keywords for a website is an over all quality score.

A website with a high bounce rate may receive less visibility. It may also be a sign that the user has found their answer, this can tie in with pogosticking (more information below).

A website that receives large amounts of direct traffic may see an increase in organic visibility.

Websites with repeating traffic may also receive a visibility boost.

This is a kind of bounce rate where the user will jump from one website to another when searching for a specific query because the user has not found the correct answer. Bouncing down the organic rankings until they find a satisfactory answer.

A signal that tells Google if a website has been blocked, this is typically due to security issues.

Pages that are bookmarked on a users chrome browser may receive a small boost.

User interaction within a page or post will help to showcase that a post is of quality (if it provides quality interaction like comments). This can sometimes result in a small boost.

The longer a user spends on your page the better and is a sign that the content on your page is engaging and of quality.

Google will give newer pages a boost for certain searches.

Google may add diversity for keywords that have multiple meanings.

Websites you visit more often will receive a ranking boost. This is typically because you are signed into Google and it has been recording your browsing history. You will notice this because it will say ‘you last visited this page 3 days ago’.

Your search history will impact what you see in similar (or relative) searches.

Featured snippet spots will help your website to receive more impressions via organic, however it may lead to a reduce in traffic as users are finding out what they are looking for. More on rich snippets and Schema later in this page.

Google will give special treatment to locally hosted and advertised websites. This can be further boosted with the use of Google My Business.

Websites with adult content and keywords will not appear in Google;s safe search.

Google downgrades websites with legitimate DMCA complaints. Removing content if any copyright infringement is deemed true.

Since Google’s Bigfoot update, a wider range of domains are now featured within the SERP’s. This helps to give more website the opportunity to rank and helps to stop monopolisation.

Google may showcase additional information in the organic listings that could be relative to opening times or price information.

Local searches have become more prominent over the last few years, highlighting the importance of Google My Business and Google Map listings.

Featured in the ‘top stories’ box in the organic listings. This can happen for a number of special reasons.

Google will typically favour big brands within the search engine rankings.

Products that are featured in the ‘shopping results’ snippet and tab.

Some phrases feature a ‘related image’ snippet, where relative images will be present. This typically happens when a brand has its logo researched often.

Brand based keywords will often showcase several results from the same website. Typically up to four positions can be help by a single website. This is great news as brands typically like to dominate their own searches to push out competitors targeting the keywords.

An algorithm update that was created by Google to clean up spammy queries and to help to protect users.

Branded anchor texts are what your anchor text profile should have the most of (brand name, brand name.com etc). The more of these, the better.

If people are actively searching your brand name, this will reflect well in the organic searches and can help boost the website over all.

If people are actively searching your brand name plus another keyword, keywords surrounding that other keyword may also have a boost. For example, people search for ‘TrustATrader plumber’ and TrustATrader also ranks well for other plumbing keywords that are competitive.

We know that social signals can play a part in the organic rankings. Brands that have large social media followings on Facebook typically see a boost in positioning.

Like having a strong Facebook profile, having a strong Twitter profile that has a lot of followers also helps your brand signal.

Having an active official company profile on LinkedIn helps to increase your legitimacy of the brand, which in turn helps to build your brand profile.

Verified authors used to get a ranking boost in the SERPs. Since then, Google has shut this off and no longer has this. However, if you are a trusted publisher, your brand status will help you to get that boost that was once quite easy to get. Google Authoriship officially died (properly) when G+ shut down.

Even if your brand social media platforms have a large follower count, it is strongly recommended that you engage people and to increase activity. This helps to showcase to Google that you are an active company.

Brand mentions in the top stories snippet not just help to increase your visibility but is also a signal to how strong your brand signal is.

If your’e a company that gets spoken about a lot, you will often get brand mentions that are un-linked. This is also a brand signal (however most of us do prefer the back link)!

Every legitimate business has a real office, real location or real place of operations. Showcasing this on your website helps to increase the trust to your business. Showcasing this on Google My Business is also key to this ranking factor.

The panda update was designed to focus on high quality websites with high quality content. Websites that did not adhere to this received a penalty, which really limited the amount of visibility they received.

Websites that link to low quality websites that are typically spammy may also receive less visibility.

Hidden links and redirects can definitely lead to a Google ban. One of the most famous bans was given to BMW, who had a host of hidden doorways through out their website.

Pop-ups and a large amount of distracting adverts lowers your page’s quality score, resulting in less visibility.

It has been known that Google bans websites that use pop ups that cover a whole page or deceive the user. More on this and how to avoid it in the link below.

Various back hat techniques such as keyword stuffing can really harm your website. Google picked up on over optimisation and penalises websites that game the system.

Poor quality content or ‘spun’ content can harm your website. Spun content is typically auto generated content that is directly copied from another website, so remember to keep to original and unique content practices only. Google is smart at reading things.

If a page redirects to a completely different page of topic, this can result in a penalty. Try to keep your redirects relative to the original pages content topic.

Pages with too many adverts and very little text can harm your visibility, sometimes leading to a ban if it has been overly abused.

Hiding affiliate links can result in a penalty, this is because the website may be trying to deceive a user.

The Fred algorithm update was designed to penalise website that had really, really bad content and sites that over monetised. Typically de-indexing the worst offenders.

Over linking to affiliates could harm your online visibility and rankings.

Auto generated content is a big no-no and should be avoided at all costs, no matter how little time you have for this. If you get caught generating auto generated content, it will result in an instant Google ban and complete de-indexation.

Over emphasising on certain elements such as nofollow’s will look like you are purposely scupting a page for illegitimate reasons. It can look a little black hat and may result in a penalty.

Servers can get flagged for spam too and if your server has been flagged, it could affect all of the websites hosted on that server. Shared hosting websites, you have been warned.

Keyword stuffing your meta tags can result in less visibility, this falls under the over optimisation factor we spoke about earlier.

Hacked websites will be removed from the index quite quickly, so if your website has been hacked, it is important that you solve the issue very quickly before the page gets re-crawled.

An unnatural amount of links from poor sources will result in the page being removed from Google. If you have been victim to negative SEO, you can perform a disavow to help tackle this.

The penguin update was designed to tackle websites with really poor backlink profiles. Giving them less visibility in the search engine rankings.

Large amount of links that have been obtained from low quality websites, such as comment spamming, will have a lot less chance of ranking.

Links that have been gained from a wide range of sources might look spammy again. It is important that if you are targeting links, to keep them on topic with your pages content.

If your website has been given a warning message from Google stating that it is of low quality, you may receive a ranking drop. Messages like this are quite a rare event, so if you do receive one, it is important to act fast.

Over the years, Google has relied less on directory links to help build their index. If you are listed on numerous low quality directories, this could potentially have a negative effect on your backlink profile.

Having widget links is frowned upon by Google but it typically has very little punishment. Widget links are against Google’s terms of service.

An unnatural amount of links from the same C-Class IP may result in a penalty as it looks like the links that have been build have been auto generated from the same source.

Over optimised anchor text profiles, especially when targeting ‘money terms’ may be a sign of link manipulation and over optimisation.

Receiving a large amount of links at once can devalue the links and showcase unnatural behaviour.

Back in the day, links from PR websites were very valuable, these days they hold little or no value at all. This is because the links generated are manipulated by the content creator and easily acquired.

Manual actions (or penalties) taken out on a website are usually performed when a website has demonstrated bad behaviour online. This is one of the worst penalties you can receive.

Selling links goes against Googles terms of service and can result in a large penalty. If you use a link broker to obtain new links, think again before parting with your money.

New websites that see a large increase in links may be limited in visibility. This is to stop people manipulating the algorithm and binning websites once they have been caught.

Google Dance is designed to shake up the rankings if certain search queries are not giving a user their desired result.

The Google Medic update focused on ‘medical’ based websites that actively sell or promote drugs. This reduced their visibility, websites that were more trusted, received better gains.

Google’s disavow tool is a great feature in the search console that tells Google about links that may be harming your over all link profile. If you have been a victom of negative SEO, this tool is an absolute life saver.

A reconsideration request can be submitted to Google for domains that have been removed from the index. This can be handy when you have recently bought a domain and the previous owner has had it penalised.

Temporary link schemes really hold little long term value to a website and can harm your website is you are found to have manipulated your backlinks.

This was an update that focused on featured snippets within the search ranking pages. One of the biggest features was that position 1 in the organic listings is now officially the featured snippet (instead of two listings previously).

Aggregate ratings are great to help you stand out in the search engine rankings by adding 5 stars for any reviews you have showcased on that page.

The use of organisation schema will help to create a knowledge graph card, further highlighting your business or brand. Certain features to this can be added such as social media profiles.

The use of FAQ schema will increase the chance of you receiving a rich snippet at the top of a search query.

Product schema will help you to create structured data around products listed on a page.

Event schema will help to create a rich snippet about an upcoming or previous event. Great if you need your event to stand out from the crowd.

Job posting schema will highlight opportunities for specific keyword sets. Typically for keywords such as ‘jobs in Basingstoke’.

Article schema helps Google to understand that your page is an article.

Book schema helps to authenticate a book title and acts as if it was organised in a library (IBAN etc).

Breadcrumb schema helps Google to understand the websites hierarchy and internal linking structure. Which in turn can help crawl ability of the website.

Using the ContactPoint schema, you can highlight specific people who work for a company. Great for showcasing your awesome CEO.

Course schema helps to highlight a sequence of educational events, helping to build knowledge.

Dataset schema uses metas and other elements to help Google to fully structure information.

Using the broardcast event schema, this states to search engines that the video in question was part of a live event.

Similar to organisation schema, this type of structure helps smaller businesses to provide information to the knowledge graph. Google My Business also helps to provide this kind of information.

Logo schema helps Google to identify the logo of a business, helping it to feature in the knowledge graph as well as Google Images.

Actions is a bit of structured data that showcases particular events during a period of time.

Occupation schema helps to structure recorded training or formal qualifications of a person. Very handy if you have a lot of relative qualifications.

Recipe schema will help you to showcase your great meals in the search engines by showcasing additional elements such as imagery, or process within the search engine rankings.

Sitelinks search box are great for websites that have a lot of pages or its own search function. If a website does, it may receive its own search box within the search engine ranking pages.

Social profile schema is typically implemented with organisation schema and will showcase your social media profiles (if active) within the knowledge graph.

At the point of writing this, speakable schema is still in beta and helps Google to identify elements in an article that can be suited for audio playback. This helps devices such as Alexa or Google’s very own home hub.

I hope you found the information in this article useful, it took some time to compile! Like any piece of complicated content, we will devote more time into keeping this up to date and of course there are probably factors that we have also missed or overlooked.

If you think you can add to this article, please do feel free to let us know and we will be more than happy to credit you with a link back to your website for any valuable pieces of information you can provide. As you have seen at the top of the article, there is a free excel sheet that highlights all of the factors mentioned in this article. This is to help you perform an audit or checks on a website.

If you enjoyed this article or think it could be useful for someone else, please do share it (and build those important natural links back to this page).

Also please see on the right, some of the main sources that were used to create this. Thanks again for reading through.

Kind regards – Cai Simpson

Find below a list of people that made this article happen.

Brian Dean – Backlinko

Brians blog post is the original inspiration for this document. Most of the credit for this document should really go to him – fantastic guy with outstanding SEO knowledge.

Barry Schwartz – Search Engine Land

Barry is one of the most popular SEO journalists and helps people like myself, find out the most up to date SEO information and knowledge. Kudos to him for the work he does.

Search Engine Journal

The team at Search Engine Journal do a fantastic job with keeping us up to date with search marketing news and have some brilliant writers on board who post interesting research topic that have been used in this document.

Alex Chris – Reliable Soft

Alex has a really great guide to rich snippets and schema if you are not fully up to date on this.

Edward Bernstein

Edward was very helpful with sorting out various typo’s through out the document. A big thank you Edward!