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Information On Search Engine Ranking Factors
By Rich Brooks
Expert Author
Article Date: 2008-06-23
The secrets to #1 ranking at Google will not be revealed here...
However, I found a fascinating Web page at seomoz.org called Google Search Engine Ranking Factors. This document gathered the "collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization" and had them weigh in on the importance of a number of variables that determine whether you rank higher than your competition.
Each variable was given an importance ranking of 1 (does not influence ranking) - 5 (strongly weighted) and an agreement ranking (lower numbers mean more agreement), as well as showing the comments from these SEO experts.
It's important to understand that when it comes to search engine visibility, even the industry leaders often disagree. None of them know the answers...none of them have the "teacher's edition" to Google. Rather, their Google success has come through reverse engineering based on years of experience of testing and tweaking sites for optimal performance. And, to further confound the typical small business owner, these variables are constantly being tweaked by Google to improve their results, so what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.
Some personal highlights:- Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages: 3.5 (high importance), 1 (average agreement.) What?!? Linking to other sites can help your search engine visibility? While it's long been believed that linnking to other sites can actually give away your search engine juice, linking to the right pages may help. As Jonah Stein says, "Rand [the site owner)], your [sic] letting the last SEO secret out of the bag. Shame on you ;-)"
- HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards): 1.4 (slight importance), 0.6 (high consensus.) A slam to everyone who claims that you can't rnakn well w/o perfect validation. My favorite quote was from Mike McDonald: "Validation? Please, oh please, make it go away. Validation zealots just plain freak me out. Walking under ladders, breaking mirrors and stepping on cracks probably has more influence on your SERPs than validation." The other experts tended to say that validation won't help, but really badly built sites could have enough errors to block spiders from propertly indexing your site. In short, good code is good practice, but perfect code won't help you rank higher.
- Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc): 2.5 (moderate importance), 1.2 (average agreement.) It's long been said that a .edu or .gov link is worth its weight in gold (never mind that links have no weight.) The consensus here seems to be that this is to to correlation, not causation. In other words, .edu and .gov sites are often linked to by important sites, so they're viewed as important and trustworthy. The domain extension is not the reason, however.
If you are interested in reading the whole document you can find it here (50 pages printed). If you want skip that and get some one-on-one help improving your own site's visibility, give flyte a call.
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About the Author:
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients' sites through search engine optimization,
e-mail marketing, business blogs and podcasts, and viral marketing.
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