Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors from About.com — Plus One More
About.com’s Online/Hosting Expert Gregory Go recently wrote up a highly instructive list on search engine optimization basics called the “Top 10 Search Engine Ranking Factors”. It’s a great primer on how to optimize your site for that most important online marketing element, search engine placement. To write it, he compiled information from “the top 37 search engine optimization (SEO) professionals,” adding some of their quotes to his own advice.
Mr. Go acknowledges right away that search engine ranking can never really be an exact science, due to the fact that the big players are always changing their criteria — which they also choose to keep secret. And let’s face it, Google dominates so much of the market here that their search engine algorithms are almost the default standard. And they keep a very tight lid on things.
Of course, that’s necessary to make sure people don’t exploit a too-familiar or too well-known system, which some people would certainly do. But, it can also really make a challenge out of staying on top of the art of search engine placement.
That being said, there are some fundamental guiedlines that are always going to help. Here are the top 10 search engine criteria, as compiled by Gregory Go:
- Keyword Use in Title Tag
- Anchor Text of Inbound Links
- Global Link Popularity of Site
- Age of Site
- Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
- Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
- Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
- Keyword Use in Body Text
- Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
- Topical Relationship of Linking Page
Each point is backed up with pointers and quotes from the relevant experts. It’s a great read, even if you already consider yourself to be an SEO expert. Read it here.
Let’s talk about the fourth point, Age of Site, for a moment. In your search engine optimization research, it’s probably a term you’ve come across more than once. Among the criteria that search engines use to rank your site is its age, which is determined by the date of your domain registration. That information comes directly from the WHOIS, the widely used database search interface that compiles ownership and details of domain names and IP addresses. Each and every domain name is indexed on the WHOIS database, and when a domain name expires, it’s eventually removed after a certain period of time. To learn more about this process, and to take advantage of an advanced WHOIS search tool to investigate your domain name or others, go to Aplus.net’s own Advanced WHOIS Search page.
Aplus.net’s “Plus One”
As great as this Top 10 list, there’s an 11th factor that might would make it even better:
11. Keyword Use in URLs
Understanding the basics of URL structure is important when determining SEO. Remember when optimizing your web copy and linking structure for SEO that it’s also very important to include your main keywords and phrases in your website’s URL address. This is a big factor in determining your page ranking.
URL keyword use is not only a useful addition to this list, it’s a topic in and of itself. A whole article could be written about how choosing the right domain name is key to URL structure, and the enormous impact that has on your search engine placement.
What are the factors that led you to choose your domain name? Were you thinking about the identity of your company? For most of us, the domain name is the first part of our website that we build; oftentimes, whole websites are created around a good domain name. But does your domain name contain your key word? Or a number of key words? It’s more important than you may realize. And it’s something we’ll cover in a future post.