Everyone wants to know what will take me to the top or what are the factors that determine my position in the listings for a specific keyphrase and what is their relative importance?
Every client and agent involved in SEO wants the answer to these questions but, unfortunately, the many factors involved in these answers are limited to just a few senior engineers who work for the search engines. However, by using what information that is available and using personal experience, one can list the most important factors which determine position in the listings.
The position or ranking in the natural listings for a particular keyphrase is dependent on the ranking algorithm of a search engine. The algorithm uses certain rules to identify the most relevant pages based on the text content of a page and its context which can be indicated by links from other pages or sites.
Each search engine has different algorithms produced by engineers who are endeavouring to produce the best relevance for its users.
The ranking of natural listings has evolved as a science over the past few years, and, as with all sciences, certain fundamental principles apply.
So search engines now use common search engine ranking factors.Before discussing these factors, it should be understood that understanding some of the most common ranking factors is very straightforward. Grasping these concepts isn't rocket-science. The main difficulty, longterm, is managing your keywords and optimization, not understanding the ranking factors.
It is important that members of your team understand these ranking factors and also that everyone understands how good quality content can improve search rankings.
If you don't know what keyphrases to use you'll get nowhere.The six key ranking factors are as follows....
1. Planning and strategy including performance targets.
2. Index inclusion and coverage.
3. On-page optimization.
4. Internal and external link building.
5. SEO process.
6.Conversion efficiency.
Of these six factors, the most important are 2, 3 and 4 because you cannot expect any search engine referrals if your pages are not included within the index. Once they are in the index, results are dependent on the combination of on-page optimization and link-building. We are mainly talking about third-party links but you also need a good, solid linking structure within your own websites.
SEO is extremely challenging because of the number of factors it is necessary to understand, but it is possible to give yourself a better chance than most by following the right principles.
So, of all the factors used by search engines to determine relevance these are the most important.
1. On-page optimization. This means matching the copy on the page to the search terms entered.
--- Be sure not to overdo 'keyword stuffing'.
--- Think of it as labelling in the most appropriate way.
--- Headline and link text should reflect the editorial content.
--- Readers should not be able to notice optimization.
2. Link-building. This creates links into a page. The search engine will assess each link to a page from another page as a vote for this page. Pages and sites with the most inbound links will be the highest ranked.
--- It is not only the quantity of links which are important but their quality.
--- Quality is determined by context, relevancy and popularity of the linking page, as well as the link anchor text and adjacent text.
--- Not all links are treated equally. One link from an authority website may be more valuable than hundreds from non-contextual websites.
Always be aware that spam filters can reduce the position of a site or remove it entirely.