There’s TONS of stuff online on what determines the search ranking of a website. Everyone’s an expert and there’s tons of information on how to do this. Well, the Folks at SEOmoz who are the experts when it comes to SEO and everything else connected with it, came up with these search ranking factors
Naturally, after reading all of it, I was inspired by all the authoritative minds and penned this post about what really matters while SEOing your website to make sure it’s in line with what the search engines are looking for. Here’s what you should focus on :
Keywords/Content (This section relate to search term usage in determining the rank of a page i.e. how many times is someone out there in the whole wide world using a keyword specific to your business to search for a service or product specific to your industry)
- Keyword use in Title Tag – this one is simple. If you want a page to show up in the search results of a search query initiated by potential customers, place the targeted search keyword/phrase in the title tag of the webpage’s HTML header.
- Keyword use in Body – Man, this one is simpler. All you have to do is place the targeted keyword in the visible HTML content of the page, but don’t place it in such a way that you spam your own site. According to industry experts, typical keyword density should be 2-3 times per 100 words.
- Meta Content – Yeah, I know. Everyone says it doesn’t matter, but better safe than sorry. And, as far as I know, Yahoo and Bing still give credence to meta content.
- Content – This, as always, is King. No ambiguity about that. Content builds with strong SEO influences will help your brand’s cause on the Internet.
Nature of Inbound Links (This is a big one. Essentially, this category is about the credibility of folks on the Internet who are linking to your site so, the more popular they are on the Internet and the more relevant they are within their business spaces, the more weight you get from the search engines for being endorsed by them link wise. So, if the external links pointing back to your page get an A+ from the search engines, you’re in business! Note that we’re talking about active or dofollow links here – passive or nofollow links do not count.)
- Anchor Text of Inbound Link – This is a key attribute. What do your inbound link partners reference you as? What the other site name you while linking back to you matters to the search engines. If they just call you link1 or another generic name, that wont hold well with Google. Now, if you were a travel company selling trips to Cancun and a partner site linked to your web page advertising Cancun Vacations using the anchor text ‘ Cancun Vacation Packages’, the search engines would give you a thumbs up. If the partner just used ‘Vacations’ or ‘Trips’ as the anchor text, you would not get as many points.
- Global Link Popularity of Linking site – This is about where the linking site stands on the web as compared to all other websites. So, if it’s not ranked too highly don’t expect to get too many points from Google when they index your page and find an inbound dofollow link from a link-farm based in Timbuktu.
- Topical Connection – This refers to how closely related are the backlink’s content to yours. It’s that simple. If you get a link from a office furniture company to your tropical vacations website, don’t gasp in disappointment if after a few weeks you’ve actually fallen in Google’s rankings than risen.
Domain Attributes (What matters to search engines about your domain. This, like the keyword piece above is an intrinsic quality)
- Global Link Popularity – This is relevant. Where do you stand with regards to link authority on the web as compared to all other websites? If you’re not too high, start implementing a grassroots SEO strategy to get you inching to the top, slowly but surely.
- Age of Site – This is determined by when the website’s content was indexed by the search engines – Note that this is not the date of original registration of the domain.
- Topical relevance of inbound links to your site – This is essentially a correlation between the sites linking to your target pages’ content and your target page keywords.
- Popularity of your website within your peers – How highly are you ranked among your peers in your industry on the web? This is important for you to know especially since the web has become an extremely competitive forum
Page Attributes (This is about how search engines understand your webpage independent of keywords)
- Internal link popularity – This is another key ingredient as it’s based on the site’s design & structure. So, a good web architecture does matter when designing a website. Additionally, how often are top pages on your website referenced by your internal pages and what anchor text is used to reference them. All this is important.
This sums up the article. I’m hoping to have a visual depiction of the same and will post it soon to give folks better clarity on what factors play a role in dtermining how your website gets ranked by the search engines.
