Search Engine Ranking Factors: What Really Matters
Posted on | December 2, 2009 | 51 Comments
Keyword ranking factors have always been a subject of significant debate, which confuse many businesses as they attempt to optimize their websites to perform well for their chosen keywords. I recently encountered a great article on search engine ranking factors on SEOMoz.org that distilled the opinions of 72 high profile SEOs. I think this may be a great way to cut through the clutter for many.
Based on the cumulative opinions of these experts I’ve selected the top 5 search engine ranking factors and offer some comments that apply to businesses who would like to rank more highly for their selected keywords. Furthermore, I’ve included the level of importance assigned by SEOMoz as a point of interest. My top 5 search engine ranking factors for business include:
- Existence of Substantial, Unique Content (65% Importance)
- Use Keyword in the Title (66% Importance)
- The Order of the Keywords Used in the Title (63% Importance)
- Keyword-Focused Anchor Text From External Links (73% Importance)
- Quantity and Quality of External Links (71% Importance)
Before I get into my specific comments, let me explain my reasoning. I first concentrate on components that a company has within its direct control and later those on which it has less.
Developing links to a website is perhaps one of the most important components of Search Engine Optimization, however basic groundwork must be done in advance. A link is essentially a vote for the website receiving that link; therefore that site must be of some value or interest to a site’s users in order to earn that link. Once significant unique content is being created, the company must ensure that it clearly communicates the subject of that content by titling it correctly. Finally, obtaining links should be easier if the content is created and labeled effectively, although it must be done actively.
In my opinion:
Creating Keyword-Rich, Valuable Content Regularly is of the Greatest Importance
Many companies allow their busy schedules to derail their content creation and SEO efforts, but this doesn’t have to happen. Interesting content is generated every day by people and situations within a business; they just have to recognize it when it comes along. Frequently asked customer questions, an interesting engineering challenge or an opinion on a recent industry development all constitute interesting content. Finally, make sure to document these situations, ideas and thoughts; afterwards take the time to write an article or blog post with a focus on the targeted keywords. If writing isn’t your thing, then hire someone to do it.
Title Blog Posts & Articles to Clearly Communicate Their Subject
This sounds simple, but too many companies overlook this important component. Once your content has been created, entitle it to correctly communicate the subject of the article. The title of the article should include the targeted keyword(s); furthermore the earlier that the keywords appear in the title the better. For example, I could have entitled this post “What Really Matters in Search Engine Ranking,” but instead I chose the title “Search Engine Ranking Factors: What Really Matters.”
Continually Build Links Using Keyword-Rich Anchor Text
As suggested by the SEOMoz experts, correctly building links to your website is of tremendous importance. Building links is fairly simple to understand but can be complicated to execute; techniques used to build links include blog commenting, social bookmarking, writing blog posts for other blogs and submitting to directories among many others. Once again, when asking for or creating a link to your website it is ideal to have the keyword in the anchor text, which is the copy contained within the hyperlink that when clicked sends the user to your website. Therefore, the anchor text in this link: Philadelphia Search Engine Optimization is “Philadelphia Search Engine Optimization.”
Search engine ranking factors continue to be a subject of great debate, however with guidance from expert SEOs and the application of common sense, companies can achieve strong results in their search engine optimization efforts. With that said, sometimes there are simply not enough hours in the day to understand and apply these techniques. How and what are you doing? Is it consistent with the “experts” advice?
Bill Rowland
Tags: Search Engine Optimization > search engine ranking factors > search marketing > SEO > seomoz
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51 Responses to “Search Engine Ranking Factors: What Really Matters”
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December 8th, 2009 @ 11:57 pm
I like your thoughts and agree with you. Building out an authority site is going to become even more important with personal search becoming more important to the search engines. Its going to require long tail keyword analysis.
December 29th, 2009 @ 11:09 am
Thank you for these tips, it’s really useful for me. I’m still trying to build good content and choose the right keyword for my blog. Choosing the right keyword is not easy for me, I should practice over and over. I hope I can make good progress in the future. Have nice day
December 31st, 2009 @ 12:38 am
I think unique content is of foremost importance. Then comes title rest can be ignored
January 7th, 2010 @ 12:46 am
I do personally think that content should always come first in each and every ranking factors. Why? Its because, the reason why we are optimizing a certain blog or site is its nice content.
And about the link building area, It will stay on the top 2 spots of all ranking factors, in any SE’s.
January 7th, 2010 @ 10:11 am
SEO can be a deep knowledge which require some skill to master.
January 7th, 2010 @ 9:03 pm
Nice concise article. Certainly of value to me, and have a created a link from my blog.
Having found your site via this post, I will now be a regular reader, so please keep up the good work.
Cheers
Paul
January 7th, 2010 @ 10:04 pm
Paul, thanks for your comment. We’d love to hear about your experiences.
January 8th, 2010 @ 5:24 am
“Use Keyword in the Title”
> Use keyword in Url, THE MOST IMPORTANT thing to me, it greatly facilitates the SEO work
January 9th, 2010 @ 1:37 pm
It seems to me that all of these reasons are worth little:
* Existence of Substantial, Unique Content (65% Importance)
* Use Keyword in the Title (66% Importance)
* The Order of the Keywords Used in the Title (63% Importance)
* Keyword-Focused Anchor Text From External Links (73% Importance)
* Quantity and Quality of External Links (71% Importance)
I have a site with all of this and PR0 and I have site with 100 backlinlinks without optimization. That site have PR4.
January 11th, 2010 @ 7:17 am
Yes I totally agree with you, your article provides great knowledge about how to make a content rich website. I’m trying to make one: exambazar.com but I haven’t been able to succeed.Try to follow your advice I think provides great benefit for me …thanks a lot.
January 11th, 2010 @ 9:02 am
I have a question about content:
Do you think content is articles alone or can it be video or even some banners as well?
January 13th, 2010 @ 6:49 pm
Well, clearly you believe that keyword-rich anchor text is important
I think most would agree that it would be overly simplistic to think that only these five factors have an influence on your site’s ranking. There are many other factors that may explain the difference in performance between your two sites. I simply picked the “top 5″ factors as picked by well-known and respected industry experts.
January 17th, 2010 @ 7:33 pm
I seriously loved your thinkings and i absolutely agree with you. Building out an authority site is going to become even more essential with personal search becoming more essential to the search engines. Its going to require long tail keyword analysis.
January 19th, 2010 @ 11:49 am
Rahul,
Thanks for your comment. I think that using improved title tags for your forum site should help a lot. Terms like: “MBA, CAT, Engineering, Jobs,Exam Papers, Exam Results” are a bit too generic if you hope to compete for traffic and users.
January 19th, 2010 @ 11:53 am
Jesper,
It’s important to have content of all types, but keyword rich copy is the foundation upon which solid search results are built.
January 19th, 2010 @ 2:22 pm
The domain name is king, and the problem is that it’s the only think we can’t change easily, so take care noobs
January 23rd, 2010 @ 4:40 pm
As the stats show, more than 70% importance is to build quality links and external links. This is what I believe is the best way to get the higher PR. I have followed google for plenty of years now and the recent PR update was totally depend on the backlinks you have. Quality backlinks certainly increase your Google PR to great extent.
January 24th, 2010 @ 7:31 pm
Thank you for this article. I only knew that you need keyword rich content, but didn’t know that also the order of the keywords are important.
January 25th, 2010 @ 10:03 am
Aneel,
In my opinion, focusing on PageRank is a “red herring;” while it may be good general indicator of quality, it is in no way definitive. Since businesses should focus on ranking and converting for their targeted terms, chasing page rank can at times be unproductive.
January 26th, 2010 @ 6:27 am
Great read on the basics of SEO, which once in place, it’s Content, Content, Content.
January 28th, 2010 @ 6:48 am
Informative post on Search Engine Ranking Factors. I feel backlink building is the most important. Of course it depends on quality contents. Everybody like to refer to quality content. Thanks for elaborating these points.
February 8th, 2010 @ 4:25 am
Using my keyword in the title in my domain names makes all the difference in the world. A keyword domain with a .com is unbeatable by any site if the domain is the exact keyword.
February 9th, 2010 @ 11:58 am
I like your thoughts and agree with you. Building out an authority site is going to become even more important with personal search becoming more important to the search engines. Its going to require long tail keyword analysis.
February 13th, 2010 @ 1:01 pm
Also the context around the anchor text of the link placed on a external web site linking to you is important.
February 19th, 2010 @ 10:48 pm
I have been focusing on long tail traffic and adwords. Refreshing to see tips that actually get hits. Appreciate it.
March 23rd, 2010 @ 7:27 pm
Great information Bill, I would definitely agree you need to build a large amount of links that include the anchor text of the keyword you want to rank for. Depending upon how hard it is to rank for each keyword, you will obviously need to build a lot for hard to rank for keywords.
March 28th, 2010 @ 2:37 pm
Thanks for the article. Do you think it’s important to have several link building strategies or does it matter is you only focus on one strategy like submitting articles to directories?
March 29th, 2010 @ 7:34 am
It’s important to have content of all types, but keyword rich copy is the foundation upon which solid search results are built.
March 31st, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
Michael,
I think that most people would suggest that it’s better to build links using a variety of ways. Since your firewood site focuses on selling firewood in specific geographies, finding directories that will deep-link to city-specific pages, like “/humboldt-county-firewood/” and “/southern-oregon-firewood/” would be more impactful than submitting to article directories, but that’s just my guess.
April 8th, 2010 @ 2:51 am
I think the backlinks from rich content based and high pr site which related to industry gives more preference to rank on search engine.
April 19th, 2010 @ 6:49 pm
Great article, agree on everything! People forget the basics of SEO!
-Tedi
Founder of TK Designs
April 23rd, 2010 @ 7:40 am
seo related to industry gives more preference to rank on search engine.
May 4th, 2010 @ 11:08 am
Title, h1 tags, anchor text in links , content is all important. Don’t go overboard it needs to have a good balance overall.
May 5th, 2010 @ 3:01 pm
Thanks, you really cleared a few things up for me. I’m not sure I’ll ever really understand all the aspects of SEO though, there are just so many conflicting reports.
May 7th, 2010 @ 11:13 pm
The link counts anyway, no matter the “dofollow” or “nonfollow”. The accumulative effect will show up.
June 10th, 2010 @ 3:30 pm
I think original unique content with balanced keywords matters more in search engine rankings.
I think dofollow is better than nofollow.
June 11th, 2010 @ 7:45 am
Just wanted to get a little bit of insight from different perspectives on the subject. Is it title tags? External links? Keyword use in meta keywords tags? Or something else? There are a wide range of factors out there and I’m just curious to see what everyone thinks.
Thanks!!
orkut
June 21st, 2010 @ 3:22 am
Don’t go overboard it needs to have a good balance overall.
June 27th, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
really appreciable article. one thing i just want to say there is no way that you can be on top on worlds all search engines every search engine works with different techniques. ofcourse google at the top, everyone love to be there and thsi article is a sureshot for you to top at major search engines
July 4th, 2010 @ 3:56 pm
Don’t go overboard it needs to have a good balance overall.
July 5th, 2010 @ 11:11 am
Ofcourse when it come to ranking factors, backlinks with anchor test play an important role. But my experience proven that the keyword must be repeated in domain, anchor text, h1, and at least 2% keyword density. With these factor you can dominate SERP. In fact I never did any social bookmarking or feed, but my sites are at first page for certain keywords by following the above factors.
July 5th, 2010 @ 7:44 pm
Everyone knows that unique content is the only sure way to get top ranking in the search engines but sadly unique content comes at a price and that price is hard work and lots of time.
July 5th, 2010 @ 8:02 pm
It is better to have relevant links rather then just spam sites that are completely unrelated.
July 20th, 2010 @ 1:48 am
You’re right.Do follow links matter and No follow don’t.They can also destroy your SEO.
Thanks for the post
July 25th, 2010 @ 12:56 pm
These tips are great. I disagree with the last poster, no follow backlinks are not going to destroy your seo, they will not be counted as backlinks by google.
August 7th, 2010 @ 7:31 am
TITLE BLOG POSTS & ARTICLES TO CLEARLY COMMUNICATE THEIR SUBJECT-
I like that part. Its really helpful for new webmasters
August 10th, 2010 @ 5:25 am
Ofcourse when it come to ranking factors, backlinks with anchor test play an important role. But my experience proven that the keyword must be repeated in domain, anchor text, h1, and at least 2% keyword density. With these factor you can dominate SERP. In fact I never did any social bookmarking or feed, but my sites are at first page for certain keywords by following the above factors.chi hair tools
August 11th, 2010 @ 3:56 am
It’s important to have content of all types, but keyword rich copy is the foundation upon which solid search results are built.
August 16th, 2010 @ 10:52 pm
Well, personally, I use the plugin called all in one seo. It is very effective and I recommend everyone to use it.
August 20th, 2010 @ 2:06 am
Thank you for these tips, it’s really useful for me.
August 20th, 2010 @ 5:59 am
Very nice post with some juicy SEO tips, thanks for sharing, with your post have many people can learn lots of things.
Thanks for sharing!