[G2SEO] | Part-3: Ranking Factors
Welcome to the 3rd part of our guide. Today, we'll analyze some ranking factors that can influence your position in SERPs.
On-Page Ranking Factors
The following is a list of the different parts of your webpage that can affect its ranking.
Keywords
A specific keyword usage throughout a page helps SEs to establish its revelancy.
The keyword frequency is very important. However, many SEO specialists agree on the fact that, in order to please search engines, you will haveto use a natural approach to higlight your keywords. To do this, you can
- Naturally repeat your main keyword(s)
- Use variation and related terms.
Also, here are some tips you should keep in mind:
- Related terms are important as it looks as if the writer has alot of knowledge on the subject, thus strengthening his 'authority' (this will be covered later on).
- Keywords variance is more important for Google than other SEs.
- Google, Yahoo and MSN use different criterias to determine what is to less and what is too much when it comes to keyword frequency.
Page Title
A title will tell search engines and users what the page is about, in a line or so. It is denoted by the <title> tags (in html code) and its shows at the top of every browsers and appears in SERPs as the title of the page.
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/6171/titletagss.th.jpg
image from wellwrittenwords- Keep title tags unique for each page and specific to the content
- Try to fit the page's keywords in it
- Make it attractive
Meta tags
The meta description tag is useful in controlling the Search Engine Resulsts Pages' description of your website. To make it simple, try to make your description as descrpitive as possible, but attractive at the same time (so it can convert in click-throughs).
The use of the meta keyword tag does not have enough of an impact to invest time in it.
URL Structure
http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/830...onthebeach.jpg
Our goal here is to make the urls of your webpages as friendly as possible for your users, but also for the search engines.
Instead of www.site.com/page.php?id=12, we want www.site.com/anything.html
- Keep your URLs short, descriptive and effective
- Use keywords
- Use hyphens [-] to separate words
Duplicate Content
Depending on what is to be found on your website, duplicate content can get you either hurt your rankings or simply banned from a SE's index.
This is a quote from one of Brad Callen's lesson:
Quote:
While search engines usually do a good job of filtering out duplicate content, some (many) pages survive, and with good reason. Those websites [...] in general provide a lot of unique content of their own.
This mean that you CAN have duplicate content (but make sure you link to your source) only if the rest of your website is unique.
Duplicate content is more of a negative-only filter.
[G2SEO] | Part-3: Ranking Factors
Off-Page Ranking Factors
The following is a list of the things outside of your own pages that can affect your site's ranking.
Link Populatity
On Google, this is the main factor that affects a site's PageRank. Link popularity measures the number of all links pointing to a website.
Trust
How is a site's trust defined?
- A trustworthy website is linked to by many authority sites, ideally from the same niche.
- A trustworthy site provides revelant, accurate and good content/information.
- A trustworthy website links only to reliable and serious pages.
We might aswell say that trust is established by authority and linkg out habits.
Niche
A website's primary topic influences how well it will be able to rank to direct search queries (keywords within the same niche) and indirect search queries (keywords aimed toward a different niche).
Link Growth
A website that keeps acquiring incomming links is an indicator for Search Engines that this particular sitres still shares information that is revelant and useful.
http://images-cdn01.associatedconten...9/75_41129.jpg
Link Age
Search engines are avid to find as much as old links as they can. Why? Because there is always less spam yesterday than today. Old incomming links usually have a strong value to the SEs' eyes because they imply a long-term citation.
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That's all for now! Part 4 is getting ready...
