The funny thing about Google ranking factors is that there are heaps of them. In such a situation, it is essential to remember that the main proven ranking factors won’t cease to exist in the near future. As for the new waves, of course it is important to react to them and apply relevant changes. Unfortunately, it is really hard to keep up with an ever-evolving search engine ranking mechanism. Thus, it is comforting to know that, mostly, all the new trends touch upon the same good old ranking factors.
Let me remind you about them.
1. Content relevance.
Since keyword stuffing was more or less eradicated by Hummingbird algorithm, content became the king of the ranking factors. Indeed, what can be more important than unique content that is a perfect answer to the query? Google also thinks like that, which explains the shift to the semantic-based search. Just check it out, according to the SearchMetrics study 53% of the top 20 queries have keywords in their title tag, and less than 40% of landing pages have keywords in their H1 (NB: still does not hurt to use a fair amount of keywords in a title and meta description).
