in SEO by Jeffrey_Smith

The following bullet points are a consolidation of a few of the Top SEO Ranking Factors that authority sites use to dominate search engine results daily.

8 Factors for SEO Rankings

8 Factors for SEO Rankings

  • Understanding Internal Link Anchor Text Preference
  • Determining Competition and Thresholds for Market Saturation
  • The Application of Deep Links and Internal Link Optimization
  • Accessibility and Optimizing Pages for Search Engine Spiders
  • Emphasis of Primary, Plural and Secondary Keywords for Meta Data
  • Uniqueness of Content and Differentiation through Block Segment Diversity
  • Off Page Ranking Factor (Who Links to You with What Text and How).
  • The Amount of Time Required to Measure/Quantify Results

1. Anchor Text Keyword Preference – Controlling the preferred anchor text within a website allows you to control 50% of your websites reputation. Between on page and off page SEO what happens in between is a correlation between the content and context of your website and how search engines assign weight and relevance to those metrics. In other words, avoid using off topic keyword in links or the words “click here” like the plague. Any link on your homepage or any page with a degree of authority should ONLY have links for keywords you want to rank for. Anything else should be no followed to indicate “this link is for humans” not search engines to pay attention to.

2. Determining the Threshold of Your Competitors Market Saturation – Before you jump in with both feet headstrong and guns blazing into a competitive market or competitive keyword environment, you need to determine the threshold of what you’re up against. Use your search term “in quotes” to eliminate the broad match references to words with co-occurrence. This will allow you to assess if your pages have what it takes to capture a competitive ranking. Newer sites should stick with 50,000 competing pages or less, 100,000-300,000 for sites with some optimization and seasoned authority sites can take on competitive rankings from 1-100,000,000 competing pages or more.

3. Understanding Deep Links and Internal Link OptimizationDeep links are the number of links to a specific page from other websites. The more authority the websites linking to yours have, the more ranking factor is passed to your landing page. However, aside from that, in order to curb your dependency on off page ranking factor from other sites, consolidate your own internal links to specific pages internally to rank higher and promote keyword stemming (so your pages rank for singular, plural and other synonyms related to the root phrase topic).

4. Assess ability and Crawl Ability – Making sure your content is crawl able from search engines is half of the ranking game. If you have 10,000 pages in your site and 9000 of them are near duplicates, search engines may either ignore them or de-index them as “more of the same” supplemental rankings (to reduce clutter in their index). Hence, ensuring that you are using sitemaps, hub pages, images with the alt attribute or strong primary and secondary navigation is one way to shore up pages to reduce the possibility of link attrition. On a side note, if people cannot find the pages either, then how can you expect on of the most popular metrics to leave a mark (traffic and engagement). So, make sure that you create pages for humans, but also keep search engines in mind during the site architecture and naming convention and title tag phase to resonate with coherence.

5. Emphasis of a Primary, Plural and Secondary Keywords for Meta Data – People use all manor of singular or plural keyword and key phrase combinations that are essentially interchangeable from a standpoint of relevance. However, the closer to “exact match” your titles and naming conventions are, the higher your pages can score as a relevant hit to search engine algorithms when those queries are entered in a search bar. Hence, try to incorporate multiple keyword variations into titles as well as when building links back to pages. One example is our SEO pricing page that ranks for multiple variations in the top 5 results of Google, SEO rates, SEO/SEM pricing, search engine optimization pricing, SEO costs, etc. All from title tag relevance and the synergy between on page and off page factors.

6. Uniqueness of Content and Differentiation via Block Segment Diversity – Search engines could care less what programming platform you implement, but, the code to text ratio and text to link ratios are important regardless. So, the idea is to use a lean programming platform that allows the uniqueness of your content to flourish and differentiate itself from the other pages in your site. Search engines see your pages as a header, sidebar, body (1 column, 2 column, 3 column, etc. ) and footer, just like millions of other web pages.  So, if multiple pages in your site are using the same areas of content (from a template) or are redundant in any way shape or form, then that can cannibalize your content’s chances or standing out as a relevant landing page due to duplicate content and shingle analysis. Search engines are fussy readers, so give them something worthy to rank.

7. Off Page Ranking Factor – This is essentially who links to you and with what anchor text. The idea is to (a) produce strong internal links first then (b) deep link to specific pages with relevant anchor text to bolster rankings. The whole argument about on topic or off topic links is secondary to the fact that if you have deep links coming into subordinate pages within your website, your pages will acquire a higher degree of authority than without them. So, on page sets the stage for rankings, but off page pushes them to the top.

8. Quantifying the Amount of Time if Takes to Measure Results – This by far is one of the most important metrics. Based on the amount of attention and detail you place on the metrics above invariably impact performance. Considering 1/3 of your time will be spend planning the process of SEO, 1/3 spent optimizing the content and another 1/3 spent tracking the results, each part plays into the others granular intricacies. Patience is a virtue and based on the degree of authority your pages have will affect crawl rates and how quickly changes impact the search engine result pages. The more competitive the keyword, the more time or layers are required to elevate your website into a top ranking position. The idea here is, focus on mid tail and long tail keywords until you can step up and compete with any website on any level as a result of developing content, context and domain authority.

If you employ tact using these fundamental SEO ranking factors, it is only a matter of time, energy, content, links and effort before your pages are a force to be reckoned with in search engines. 

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About Jeffrey_Smith

In 2006, Jeffrey Smith founded SEO Design Solutions (An SEO Provider who now develops SEO Software for WordPress).

Jeffrey has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and marketing strategies to increase rankings, revenue and reach.

16 thoughts on “8 SEO Ranking Factors
  1. SEO India says:

    I will try your suggestion.

  2. this is really great post thanks for sharing
    :)….

  3. Cemil says:

    Great post.

    So it would still hold true to say that Internal Link Optimization is still not as “important” as Off Page Ranking. However it does assist in reducing your dependency of the off page factor?

  4. I would state that on page optimization is more important. The more refined your on page is, the stronger the relevance signal. This is turn means that your website can produce its own ranking factor from using absolute links alone.

    I have seen the ratio as high as 60% on page and 40% off page to produce phenomenal rankings. At least for more competitive keywords this is true. Links and the link graph are important, but pointing a bunch of links at a leaky bucket just spill link juice all over the place. Better to be efficient…

  5. I agree with all the points there. The major factor IMO are : Really good content and getting this content linked using anchor text!”!!! so powerful

  6. yes
    thanks for sharing such a nice post of Ranking factor.

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