Monday, April 5, 2010

Organic Ranking Factors

You already know if you’re an experienced SEO guy, or if you’re a newbie in SEO they you should know that search engines use complicated secret formulas popularly known as algorithms. These algorithms resolve the order of search engine ranking results. Caffeine Updates is the new Google algorithm for the year 2010. The algorithm prefers and given more importance on Website loading time. Search engines always give preference to users rather than websites or site owners.

What does search engines most care about to determine the order of their results?

There are completely different opinions within the SEO community about what works and what’s important to follow to get top place in Search engine result pages (SERP). I have collected what I believe to be the best-of-the-best as per my experience and knowledge. Here I lowdown on the important factors:

1. HTML page title (I consider and give point 2 out of 10)
2. Link Popularity-quality and quantity (2 out of 10)
3. The main body text (1 out of 10)
4. Site loading time (1 out of 10)
5. Domain name and age(1 out of 10)
6. Keyword prominence (1 out of 10)
7. Heading tag (0.5 out of 10)
8. Keyword proximity (0.5 out of 10)
9. Bold and Italic (0.3 out of 10)
10. Folders and files name (0.3 out of 10)
11. Meta Description (0.2 out of 10)
12. Alt tag (0.1 out of 10)
13. Title Attribute (0.05 out of 10)
14. Meta Keywords (0.05 out of 10)

Above all are the key factors and think about how much attention you’ve given to each of them on your own site or on client projects. As you think what matters to the search engines, I specially suggest you to keep this in mind that means each and every page is an should optimize for the following:

HTML page title: HTML page title describes a page of a website; it helps search engines to better understand what the webpage is about. It is one of those activities that will quickly affect the ways your listings look in the search engines. It plays the role of an anchor text in SERPs, which brings a link to your home page or your landing page. Write a unique and appealing title, incorporated with you main keywords phrase. This could help a flash file also to gain top page rank in SERPs.

Visible HTML text on the page: Many SEO professionals insist that you need 250 or 1000 words on a page with 5-10% of keyword density. In order to rank well for a particular set of keywords, you site should contain them. You should use as many keywords as you need to state your message clearly to the visitors and as many opportunities to insert your targeted keywords as make sense within the realm of quality writing.

Inbound links-quality and quantity: Why are inbound links are so important in search engine ranking algorithm? The answer is that they can a page’s popularity, quality and status on the web. Inbound links development is an off-page factor. Inbound links form a home/index page with high page rank, gives more boosting power rather than form pages deep within the site. The same quality factors hold true for links coming from within your site. The anchor text (Text link that directs to your site from other sites) plays a vital role in search engine ranking. The anchor text must contain your primary keywords in the phrase. Combining this keyword-rich anchor text with relevant text surrounding the link can amplify good effect.

If you pursue the above points, while doing optimization of your website, this will help you to get better ranking and visibility of your website on top search engine result pages.