SEO Ranking Factors

SEO Ranking factors are those factors that I believe the search engines take into account when deciding where to rank a website. SEO Ranking factors are synonymous with the term algorithm. For example you may have heard of the ‘Google Algorithm’ or the ‘Yahoo Algorithm’ and wondered what it means. A search engine algorithm is essentially a series of complex mathematical equations that the search engines perform which tell them where to position a website. My advice is not to get to concerned with the word algorithm, instead think of ‘ranking factors’ i.e. what factors do the search engines take into account when deciding where to rank a website?

I am starting a series of lessons called ‘SEO Ranking Factors’ in which I will explore each separate SEO ranking factor that I believe the search engines take into account. Specifically I will be concentrating on the SEO ranking factors of Google or ‘The Big G’. Why? Because Google is the still the most popular search engine, where most people perform most of the searches. If you are building a website and optimising it for the search engines my advice would be to target Google. In general if you can achieve good rankings on Google, then you can get good rankings on the other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. Google still dominates the search market and I believe will continue for a long time.

Although many ‘Gurus’ would have you believe otherwise SEO is actually very simple. There are only 2 phrases that you need to understand when thinking of SEO ranking factors.

1. Onpage SEO – These are the factors on the actual page of the website. When you create a web page there are certain action steps that you can do to the actual webpage to make sure it is SEO friendly. For example you may have heard of writing accurate ‘meta tags’ or writing with a ‘keyword density’, these are all Onpage SEO ranking factors. Don’t worry if you don’t understand what these mean yet. I’ll be going into much more detail each specific Onpage SEO ranking factor.

2. Offpage SEO – This simply refers to the number of links that you have pointing back to your website. Otherwise known as backlinks. Backlinks are the lifeblood of SEO. If you want to rank highly in the search engines then you need backlinks. There is a skill when acquiring backlinks as you don’t just want a backlink from any website. Ideally you want huge amounts of backlinks from a high relevant, highly trusted websites, although achieving this can take a long time. The search engines would like you to get backlinks by writing content that is so compelling and interesting; it invites other websites to link back to you. This is known as ‘natural link building’. Of course anyone running a website should strive to produce quality content that people would want to link to. However the reality is that if you want to rank in a reasonable time frame, then you are going to have to build links yourself. As mentioned there is a certain way to build links, which I will go into much more detail in another post. For the purposes of this post understand that Offpage SEO ranking factors (backlinks) are extremely important for the search engines decision of where to rank a website.

In each lesson will explore the specific Onpage and Offpage SEO factors that the search engines take into account. I believe that some factors are more important than others. Remember though these are just my opinions. Despite what many SEO experts would have you believe no one can tell you with 100% accuracy exactly what the search engines are looking for or which factors are more important than others.

Google itself gives us some information on the factors that it may take into account when deciding where to rank a website, but it will never give us the full exact picture. SEO is more of an art than a science. The search engines want to protect their intellectual property and rightly so. Google and Yahoo are public companies that are worth literally billions of dollars, they have a responsibility to their shareholders to protect that which has made them so successful. So always be aware of any company that guarantees page 1 listings. They only guaranteed way of getting on page 1 is paying for advertising! But for these lessons we are looking at organic SEO, i.e. how to get listed in on page 1 within the natural search results.

So I will be giving my opinion on the most important SEO ranking factors. I hope that by the end of the lessons you will have a good understanding of what you should be doing to your website to help it rank well.

Best of luck and I hope you look forward to SEO ranking factor lesson 1.