10 Major SEO Factors that affects website rankings (SERPS)
Top Ten Most Important SEO Factors for website Ranking:
1. Title Tag
This is what appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser, it comes from a metatag called “title”. As well as being used as a pure factor in SERP, it also boosts rank in other ways. Some
engines use “click-through” rates as a factor. Sites where the title closely matches the content tend to get better click-throughs (searchers see its not a spam site). When words in the title are also used as anchor text in a link to the page, you get more benefit.
2. Anchor Text of Links
The phrasing, terms, order and length of a link’s anchor text is one of the largest factors taken into account by the major search engines for ranking. Specific anchor text links help a site to rank better for that particular term/phrase at the search engines. In other words, it’s the actual text that represents the link on a web page.
3. Keyword Use in Document Text
Your keywords must appear in the actual copy of the page. Supposedly search engines pay more attention to the first and last paragraphs. The way to go about this is have your keywords firmly
in your mind as you write your copy. I don’t know about you, but I find this really hard. I prefer a different approach. There is a simple trick here, write your quality content, then use a
keyword density tool to find the keyword density. THEN, take the top words and add them to the meta keywords tag for that page. This is somewhat backwards for some maybe, it optimizes a page for what you actually wrote, rather than trying to write a page optimized for certain words. I find I get much better correlation like this and can then tweak my text afterwards.
Sure, if you want to you can further optimize by having the keywords in header tags and bold etc. As a guide, these might contribute only a few percent to the SERP
4. Accessibility of Document
“Accessibility is anything on the page that impedes a search engine
spider’s ability to crawl a page. There can be a number of
culprits:”
• Avoid Splash Pages: Flash and heavily graphic introductions prohibit engines from crawling your site.
• Avoid Frames: Never use pages with frames. Frames are too complex for the crawlers and too cumbersome to index.
• Avoid Cookies: Never require cookies for Web site access! Search engine crawlers are unable to enter any cookierequired materials.
• Avoid JavaScript when Possible: Though JavaScript menus are very popular, they disable crawlers from accessing those links. Most, well-indexed Web sites incorporate textbased
links primarily because they are search engine friendly. If necessary, JavaScript should be referenced externally.
• Avoid Redirects: Search engines frown upon companies that use numerous Web sites to redirect to a single Website.
• Avoid Internal Dynamic URLs on the Home page: Though many sites incorporate internal dynamic links, they should not incorporate those links on the home page. Engine crawlers are currently ill-equipped to navigate dynamic links – which often pass numerous parameters using
excessive characters.
• Utilize Your Error Pages: Too often companies forget about error pages (such as 404 errors). Error pages should always re-direct “lost” users to valuable, text-based pages.
Placing text links to major site pages is an excellent practice. Visit www.cnet.com/error for an example of a well-utilized error page.
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
Even more important than the holy grail of external links is internal links. Who knew! Easily the most underrated criteria. But, it’s important to make sure you are making good use of anchor text. A well-linked to document is considered more important than an obscure page, even if the links are coming from the site itself.
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site
What your website is about is determined through analysis of the content. It’s critical that it correlates to keywords, anchor text, etc. One strange off shoot of this is perhaps it’s not worth spending much effort trying to build the page rank of the home page. This strange concept is explained in the idea of Search Engine Theme Pyramids. A related factor is having a good sitemap. Not only is it good spider food, you can also load it with lots of quality anchor text for
those internal links as well as relevancy text (that which appears near a link). Also important is the invisible Google sitemap which is an xml file for the Google spider only.
7. External Links to Linking Pages
These are the links from other sites to you. Note it’s much better to have specific pages linked rather than your homepage because of the idea of Search Engine Theme Pyramids. Don’t bother with link farms or anything you see advertised for a link. You are much better off finding links from sites that have similar topics as yourself.
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
The search engine is trying to figure out what your page is about, so it can decide if it’s relevant to a users search. Links from pages with similar topics add credence to your page. When trying to search out those links you can use something like WebFerret. Or if you just want a quick method, use the “related:” tag in Google, e.g. type “related:www.yahoo.com” in and it will search for sites related to the topic of Yahoo (whatever that is?). Then spend some time emailing webmasters and asking for links. There is software out there that will do this automatically for you.
9. Global Link Popularity of Site
This means that links from sites that are “important” (i.e. have a high SERP) are more valued than those from a lower SERP. A factor worth considering when searching out links, get the ones from sites with a high page rank first.
10. Keyword Spamming
Careful, this is a negative factor!! This means having a keyword density in text or tags so high that the engine decides you are stuffing. Your rank will go from #1 to #10000 in a heartbeat. Want to know the best part? No-one actually knows what percent density this is, and it’s probably different for different engines! Between you and me, I am not going above 10% on my pages.