One of the major contributing factors to the difficulty of modern Search Engine Optimisation, is the complexity of the Google Ranking algorithm. This has produced a wide variety of optimisation techniques attempting to manipulate the algorithm. This article will provide a thorough list of the most important factors to consider when optimising your website.
These lists will be provided in terms of on-page factors and off-page factors. These lists are not provided in any particular order, because to be honest no one (other than Google) really knows which factors have the greatest importance in the Google algorithm.
Search Engine Optimisation Factors – On Page Factors:
1) Keyword in the URL
2) Keyword in the Title Tag
3) Keyword usage in the Meta Description
4) Keywords in the first H1 tag
5) Keyword used at least 3% on page and first 100 words of html
6) Sufficient content present on the page, a paragraph is not enough
7) Fresh content. This why google loves blogs, they generally have frequently updating content
8) Internal linking structure and use of keyword rich anchor text for internal links
9) Clean code allowing good crawlabilty by search engine spiders
Search Engine Optimisation Factors – Off Page Factors:
1) External backlinks to the page with referance to quality and quantity
2) Quantity/Quality of backlinks to the parent domain
3) Link diversity – domains, IPs, countries, and extensions
4) Backlink anchor text with regards to relevant keywords
5) High quality Directory listings, for example Yahoo, dmoz and BOTW
6) The quantity of indexed pages on the site
7) Domain age, Google is always more wary of new Domains.
8) Page rank
There are many other factors to consider when optimising your search engine marketing but these factors are our main prioritys.
It is worth noting that as much as the actual weighting of the algorithm is a mystery, certain factors are undeniably more important. There is a limit to how effective on page factors can be. Once on page factors have been optimised then you can pretty much never have to work on them again. But there is no limitation to the number of backlinks you can build to a page. In fact for some of the more competitve search terms on the web, you can often find several hundred thousand backlinks pointing at a page.
Overall, it is probably best to try to implement all of the above techniques because many of them are relatively easy to do and all have some SEO significance.
