Search Engine Ranking Factors

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Search engine ranking factors are the factors that that can influence a web document’s rank at the major search engines for a particular term or phrase.

Search Engine Factors
A) Keyword Use Factors
B) Page Attributes
c) Site/Domain Attributes
D) Inbound Link Attributes
E) Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes

A) Keyword Use Factors
- Keyword use in Title Tag
- Keyword use in Body Text
- Relationship of Body Text context to keywords (Topic Analysis)
- Keyword use in H1 Tag
- Keyword use in Domain Name
- Keyword use in Page URL
- Keyword use in H2, H3, H(x) Tags
- Keyword use in Alt Tags and Image Titles
- Keyword use in Bold/Strong Tags
- Keyword use in Meta Description Tag
- Keyword use in Meta Keywords Tag

B) Page Attributes
- Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
- Quality / relevance of links to external sites / page
- Age of documents
- Amount of indexable text content
- Quality of the document content (as measured algorithmically)
- Organisation / hierarchy of document flow (i.e. broad > narrow)
- Frequency of updates to page
- Number of trailing slashes (/) in URL
- Accuracy of spelling and grammer
- HTML validation of document

C) Site/Domain Attributes
- Global link popularity of site
- Age of site
- Topical relevance of inbound links to site
- Link popularity of site in topical community
- Rate of new inbound links to site
- Relevance of site’s primary subject matter to query
- Historical performance of site as measured by time spent on page, clickthroughs from SERPs, direct visits, bookmarks, etc.
- Manual authority/weight given to site by Google
- TLD extension of site (edu, gov, us, ca, etc)
- Rate of new pages added to site
- Number of queries for site/domain over time
- Verification of site with Google webmaster centre

D) Inbound Link Attribute
- Anchor text of inbound link
- Global link popularity of linking site
- Topical relationship of linking page
- Link popularity of site in topical community
- Age of link
- Topical relationship of linking site
- Text surrounding the link
- Internal link popularity of linking page within host site/domain
- Temporal link attributes (when in time the links was created/updated)
- Domain extension of linking site (edu, gov, us, ca, etc)
- Page rank (as measured by the Google Toolbar) of linking page

E) Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes
- Server is often inaccessible to bots
- Content very similar or duplicate of existing content in the index
- External links to low quality/spam sites
- Duplicate title/meta tags on may pages
- Overuse of targeted keywords (stuffing/spamming)
- Participate in link schemes or actively selling links
- Very slow server response times
- Inbound links from spam sites
- Low levels of visitors to the site (measured via toolbar, clicks in SERPs, etc)