One of my favorite blogs is seodesignsolutions – they have some of the best information on SEO services and Internet marketing around! Anyway, a recent post titled “8 SEO Ranking Factors” gives an excellent explanation of 8 very important factors that can affect the ranking of a website. Here’s an overview of that article.
The 8 ranking factors they talk about are…
1) Anchor Text Keyword Preference
2) Determining the Threshold of Your Competitors Market Saturation
3) Understanding Deep Links and Internal Link Optimization
4) Assess Ability and Crawl Ability
5) Emphasis of a Primary, Plural and Secondary Keywords for Meta Data
6) Uniqueness of Content and Differentiation via Block Segment Diversity
7) Off Page Ranking Factor
8) Quantifying the Amount of Time it Takes to Measure Results
A summary of each of these 8 ranking factors…
1) Anchor Text Keyword Preference
The article reports that internal anchor text accounts for 50% of the websites reputation. So, if you can control the anchor text linking internally, then you will gain ground in your ability to rank higher in the search engines. This means using anchor text linking within the content of your website pages to link to other pages within your website.
2) Determining the Threshold of Your Competitors Market Saturation
Basically, the article points out that you can use a guideline of sorts to determine the amount of competition you’ll be up against with a keyword phrase. Their guideline is as follows…
Type in your keyword phrase in quotes to get the search results
New websites – use keywords with less than 50,000 search results
Optimized websites – use keywords with 100,000 to 300,000 search results
Older authoritative sites – can market most any keywords
3) Understanding Deep Links and Internal Link Optimization
Everyone who owns a website and is trying to market their site wants Deep Links (these are links from other websites to internal pages of your own website). But they are often difficult to obtain. So, what a web site owner can do is to utilize internal linking (like the anchor text linking mentioned above) to market and promote their own pages.
4) Assess Ability and Crawl Ability
The article reports that half of the ranking game is all about making sure that the website pages are able to be crawled by the search engines. Using proper site architecture, clean coding and user friendly techniques on website pages is an extremely important SEO factor.
5) Emphasis of a Primary, Plural and Secondary Keywords for Meta Data
The use of a variety of semantic phrases in the body of content as well as in anchor text linking will help to ensure that a website page will rank not only for one keyword phrase but for multiple variations of the keyword phrase. So, instead of just ranking for one keyword phrase, the page will rank for a variety of forms of that keyword phrase.
6) Uniqueness of Content and Differentiation via Block Segment Diversity
No matter what code is used to create your website (html, cold fusion, php, etc) the two main factors that affect ranking is the code to text ratio and the text to link ratio. So, in order to make sure that there is more text (content) than code on your website pages the designer should use as lean a coding as possible (hence the reason for code cleanups in the SEO process).
7) Off Page Ranking Factor
Who links to you, what their status is in the search engines and the words they use to link to you with are very important factors when it comes to ranking.
8) Quantifying the Amount of Time it Takes to Measure Results
So often I’m asked, can’t you just do the SEO and then leave the website alone? Why do we have to pay a monthly maintenance? Oh, how I wish I could just do it once and then walk away. But the truth is, if I’m going to do the work right, it has to be done continuously. It’s the analytics that tell you what’s working, what’s not and it’s a constant process of change that takes place on websites. There is no way around it.
To read the entire article and more information on each of these ranking factors, visit SEO Design Solutions today.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.
