SEO Ranking Factors

As an online marketing firm with a history of expertise in search engine optimization, we've done many SEO projects. At last count, over 70 are done or in progress. We would do more except for the fact that so much confusion exists around them that it takes a long time to both sell and complete. There are a myriad of reasons, mostly to do with misconceptions of what works and what doesn't, by a company that thinks it has some in-house expertise, or worse yet 'a friend' who knows how to do SEO. We get more than a few of these later, after they have failed, or even get banned by the search engines.

With appropriate attribution to SEOmoz.org, I will list the top ten positive factors, as they have 'found' by getting feedback from some of the top SEO gurus. We've reviewed them and for the most part agree with them, although your mileage may vary, based on your OWN website. They are:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
4. Link Popularity within the Site
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

This list wouldn't be complete without the top 10 controversial factors:

1. Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google
2. Relevance of Site's Primary Subject
3. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
6. Quality of the Document Content
7. Domain Extension of Linking Site
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
9. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
10. TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, org, etc)

It's worth noting that although these factors are weighted and appear to have been researched carefully, Google's algorithm in particular has hundreds if not thousands of factors that it takes into consideration, both on-page and off-page. As you can surmise, it's an ongoing process with a lot of variables.

So the next time somebody says they can do SEO, bring some of this up and see if they know what they're doing.... The entire article can be found at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#f53

Originally Posted By : http://www.foundpages.com/blog/2007/04/seo-ranking-factors.html