3 Imperative Search Engine Ranking Factors

Never discount the power of titles, links or content for procuring a high ranking search engine position. More importantly, their numeric equivalents and ratios that impact search algorithms.

For those unfamiliar with the fundamental building blocks of on page and off optimization, each of the following components have a profound influence on how search engines view your pages. Your site essentially has three critically competitive variables that you can alter to increase your pages relative position. They are the allintext, allinanchor & allintitle ratios. Each respectively when utilized properly, can elevate your sites relevance in search engines.

If harnessed to their full potential any one or a combination of these delicate factors can produce a high ranking, position. Just like a secret sauce, each engine’s algorithm (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Ask) have their own unique attributes in how they interpret and spawn results based on such rudimentary ranking criteria. This is an overview of those ranking factors and fundamentally covers how each functions.

Those three components that one can use to create relevance are:

Allinanchor: A high concentration of links / either internal or external that saturate a particular search term. Sites that are constructed with superior internal link architecture also fall into this category. This is a primary ranking factor for meta based search engines, who rely on link popularity for their objective assessments. Essentially, popularity equals “votes” from other sites that endorse your pages by linking to you. The text phrases they use, contribute to augment your relative position, based on the semantics of the keywords used.

Allintitle: Use of a repeated keyword in the context of the title (such as a company name, keyword or brand).

Often you will see naming conventions that utilize a pipe and then by default use consistent keywords either before or after the topic of the page. This is common with blogs but is a well known SEO tactic based on siloing or theming information for logical categorization. An example would be

Description of page | consistent keywords you want to rank for (web design company, Marketing Firm, etc.)

If used frequently enough from a content development point of view, one can acquire a high ranking position from the consistent use of the prefix or consistent trailing keywords used. The reason being, titles when indexed by search engines or RSS feeds become anchor text not to mention as they mature each link gets stronger, so pages cement themselves by default if constructed properly.

With the advent of blogging or the use of content management systems, every time you publish a page, you are building more allinanchor, allintext and allintitle correlations. Depending on if you utilize them to their utmost potential, they can become dominant ranking factors as a consequence.

This is speculated to be one reason why so many domains rank for their company name (or keywords in the domain name), due to the high frequency of the words in the name being used and displayed and linking back to your pages across the web. There are of course other factors involved, but you get the gist.

Allintext: A high frequency of a particular keyword or series of keywords can contribute to creating a higher more relevant result according to search engine algorithms. The exact formula is only known by search engineers, but through multivariate testing SEO practitioners have concluded that it is the proper balance of these three elements (among many others) that contribute to acquiring a higher more refined result from search engines as a result of mixing and balancing these elements to produce the desired affect.

Depending on the mixture of each and what the search engines favor at the time, each of these respective components can work for or against your relative position.

If your site has a high allinanchor relevance, such as Adobe Acrobat for the term Click Here, this means that similar to the Google Bomb effect, a site owning a high frequency of a particular term in the anchor text a.k.a. link will obtain a high ranking position for that term. Since Adobe reader has the anchor text click here to download adobe acrobat (and uses that as the default code) they rank for the term amidst hundreds of millions of search results in Google. This is an SEO dream for most. Other examples of this ranking method are prominent in the top 10.

What you will note however, is that the term is nowhere to be found on the page it links to, which is a testament to the fact that it is not always what is on your pages that matters. Most importantly, you can rank for content that is sparsely located on a page (it is a more advanced SEO technique) but effective once structured. Here is an example using our site where we rank for the term SEO Technology, yet it is not on the page (aside from once in the description and once as a keyword in the meta tags).

Others use a content ranking strategy using the consistent application of branding / relevant modifiers under the allintitle format to eventually chip away and establish their pages. If you have a site that has several hundred or thousands of pages, this alone in conjunction with internal links can send your pages skyrocketing into the upper echelon of a category, industry or niche if you constantly use the same main keywords in your titles.

This is why naming your categories with keyword specific modifiers is a fundamental aspect of optimization. Instead of random stuff as a category name, use a relevant key phrase from the start, then the URL will have that term in it, every time you publish additional content under that sub folder.

Last but not least, the allintext ranking strategy is more of a by product that can be used to impact the others. Aside from scraper sites (made for AdSense) that harvest data from others and reconstruct it for the sake of having high allintext combinations on the page (obviously for the purpose of attracting click through traffic and being compensated). This component is better left alone as far a ranking strategy and falls more under the category of keyword density. The easy way to rank, have the terms on the page, exceed the requirement and your bound to trip a spam filter. It really is about balance, relevance and incorporating all of the elements seamlessly.

The key is to create link worthy content, share and promote it accordingly, provide a healthy influx of links, ensure that it is linked to internally to other relevant pages and above all else, tag your content accordingly.

To get a better idea of how these variables affect your search engine rankings, here is a nifty little tool called NicheWatch that can help bring these ratios into focus with solid examples of pages that employ the percentages and their respective impact in search engines.

allintext-relevance allintitle-relevance search-engine-ranking-factors SEO-&-Anchor-Text

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