Alberto Saavedra 2.0

Everyone involved in the SEO industry wants to know what factors are taken into consideration when search engines rank pages, we are not going to be able to know all the factors or how they are combined because that is the secret sauce of search engines but that does not stop us to try to figure out which ones are the most relevant.

We have some hints about the components considered by Google thanks to their related patent applications: Information Retrieval based on Historical Data, Ranking Blog Documents, Ranking Businesses at a Location in local searches, Personalization and agents that analyze content aggregation sources’ reputation; but these are too many factors to explain to our customers who just need to get better positioning on search engines.

So when the SEO’s A-list share their opinions on the most-known ranking factors you have a must-read article: Search Engine Ranking Factors V2 is the document that represents the collective wisdom of 34 SEO leaders, it is digg-worthy.

Danny Sullivan takes a look at the level of difficulty to control the most important factors ranked by the experts, really useful to introduce SEO to beginners. The factors ranked by importance and categorized as presented in the document are the following:

Keyword Use Factors

1. Keyword use in title tag
2. Keyword use in the body text
3. Relationship of body text content to keywords
4. Keyword use in H1 tag
5. Keyword use in domain name
6. Keyword use in URL
7. Keyword use in H2, H3, H(x) tags
8. Keyword use in alt tags and image titles
9. Keyword use in bold/strong tags
10. Keyword use in meta description tag
11. Keyword use in meta keywords tag

Page Attributes

1. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
2. Quality/Relevance of links to external Sites/Pages
3. Age of document
4. Amount of indexable text content
5. Quality of the document content
6. Organization/Hierarchy of document flow
7. Frequency of updates to page
8. Number of trailing slashes (/) in URL
9. Accuracy of spelling & grammar
10. HTML validation of document (to W3C Standards)

Site/Domain Attributes

1. Global link popularity of Site
2. Age of Site
3. Topical relevance of inbound links to Site
4. Link popularity of Site in topical community
5. Rate of new inbound links to Site
6. Relevance of Site’s primary subject matter to query
7. Historical performance of Site as measured by time spent on page, clickthroughs from SERPs, direct visits, bookmarks, etc.
8. Manual Authority/Weight given to Site by Google
9. Top Level Domain extension of Site
10. Rate of new pages added to Site
11. Number of queries for Site/Domain over time
12. Verification of Site with Google Webmaster Central

Inbound Link Attribute

1. Anchor text of inbound link
2. Global link popularity of linking Site
3. Topical relationship of linking Page
4. Link popularity of Site in topical Community
5. Topical relationship of linking Site
6. Age of link
7. Text surrounding the link
8. Internal link popularity of linking page within Host Site/Domain
9. PageRank (as measured by the Google Toolbar) of linking page
10. Domain Extension of linking Site
11. Temporal link attributes

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
6. Overuse of Targeted Keywords
7. Very Slow Server Response Times
8. Inbound Links from Spam Sites
9. Low Levels of Visitors to the Site

Labels: web-search

# posted by Beto : 3:06 AM