When in competition with other sites, you may constantly be checking to see how often your content is indexed, updated and accordingly ranked. Minute changes in your keywords or in major search engines’ algorithms can lead to a different result in terms of where your website appears in search results and it is no surprise that countless webmasters are concerned with how this works. Why does it seem that some websites have a quicker rate of ascension in particular search categories? We will outline the main reasons why some websites rank faster than others in a given set of search results.

Brand Recognition

Particularly when discussing Google, there is a desire by the search algorithms to list name-brand or well-known websites higher in the search results. While this has generally been the case for years, Google’s latest updates have put even more emphasis on larger websites, giving them the ability to ascend the ranks far quicker than upstart websites. Unfortunately, this can be the hardest aspect of search engine optimization to overcome; many smaller businesses and websites simply do not have the large sums of money to throw into optimization that bigger brand names do. Only a long-term strategy for improving the quality, content and reputation of your site will help you overcome this limitation.

Article Updates

Another tactic that webmasters use to get their articles, blogs and pages to the top of search results in quicker time is the act of pinging. This action essentially sends a notification to major search engines that a new article, page or blog has been posted on your site and that said search engines need to index it. Generally, bots from search engines will get around and index your site on a regular basis; pinging can speed this process up and help you get indexed in hours or days instead of weeks. With tools such as Pingler’s WordPress pinging plugin, you can get time-sensitive information distributed and indexed by search engines quicker than the status quo allows.

Backlinks

Reputation is built in large part through backlinks. It is not simply good enough to have lots of backlinks; in fact, this strategy alone may get you in trouble if the backlinks have negative or black-hat associations. Rather, you want to focus on obtaining quality, high-ranked backlinks from other sites that are more established than your own. There are numerous ways to go about this, but it is universally accepted that high-quality backlinks are one of the biggest individual contributors to search rank. The sites with better backlinks tend to rank higher and faster than those without them.

Age

The lifespan of a particular website can also play a role in how quickly changes in search results are affected. If your site is brand-new with no real authority on the internet, you should not expect to perform as well in ranking as a well-established site in a similar category that has been around for years. The ideal should not be to directly compete or outrank a site in a short period of time, but to rather achieve solid, steady search results between each update that a search engine does to its algorithms.