Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factors

Improve your site’s search engines rankings and drive huge search engine traffic your way. But while search engine optimization is essential, it is important to know which factors actually influence search engine rankings. I read this amazing Search Engine Ranking Factors report which compiled the wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. They voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm.

While I tried to grasp the concepts underlying these SEO factors, understanding the whole document takes time and effort. To make it simpler, the guys at Search Engine Journal compiled a quick reference (color chart) sorted by absolute rating of importance and not by category/type first as the original document.

4 factors which were rated high importance with full consensus were
* Keyword Use in Title Tag
* Global Link Popularity of Site
* Anchor Text of Inbound Link
* Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure

Some factors of High importance with some consensus were
* Age of Site
* Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
* Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
* Keyword Use in Body Text
* Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages
* Rate of New Inbound Links to Site
* Topical Relationship of Linking Page
* Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
* Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)
* Keyword Use in H1 Tag
* Age of Document
* Amount of Indexable Text Content
* Topical Relationship of Linking Site
* Age of Link
* Text Surrounding the Link
Negative Factors
* External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
* Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)
* Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index

These SEO factors are really insightful in helping improve your rankings in SERP’s. If you carefully analyze these factors and apply them to your site, you should definitely see a rise in search engine traffic.