On Page And Off Page Search Engine Ranking Factors

Keywords count a lot and you need to count them to be successful and they play an important role in almost all aspects of search engine optimization or PPC search engine marketing. I use a checklist to make sure I don't miss out on any of the known and relatively important factors used by most search engines to rank web pages

These ranking factors will all be covered in varying degrees of depth on other parts of this website as appropriate as we go but to allow readers to put into perspective why their own web sites might not rank highly just take a look at some of the most important items that search engines almost certainly consider in their ranking approaches.

You will notice as you go through the list that there are no reference to pictures (all images are totally disregarded by search engines for normal search text searches), Flash animation or audio or video clips. These latter items are bad news for many searchers because of lengthy download times and certainly as far as the search engines are concerned they have no relevancy at this point in time. Of course these components do have very important roles to play on the wider Internet but when it comes to home pages or information-rich pages they create more problems than solutions.

Factors influencing the ranking of any page in a SERP can be related to on-page, off-page and 3rd party matters like PageRank (named after Lawrence Page one of the developers of the Google search engine).

On page factors:

• Title tag critically assessed?

• Heading tags considered?

• Bold text use

• Proximity

• Word count adequate/exceeded?

• URL structure?

• Links depth?

• Page appearance ( eg just a list pretending to be an important web page this is often done in an attempt to gain higher rank by what the search engines consider devious means.)

• Image Alt tags used?

• Keyword density?

• Text in links?

• Broken links?

• Meta description used?

• Meta keyword tags used/overused?

• Keywords in comment tags?

Off page and 3rd party factors:

• Incoming links quantity and quality?

• Incoming links from PageRanked sites?

• Text on incoming links?

• Link farms used?

• Doorway pages?

• Redirection addresses?

• Hosting efficiency?

• Domain name selection?

• Shared IP addresses?

PageRank

This is a Google specific parameter and is important. It will be discussed in great detail later. This single parameter can be the difference between high and lower ranking no matter how well your on-page factors are optimised.

This is an incomplete list and it is rumoured that Google checks and ranks on 100 different items (refer interview with Google representative in Chris Ridings paper).

Now ask yourself how many of these items have been considered and optimised for your own web site?

Maybe you will be surprised at your low score.

To do well which means to get onto that 1st page of SERPs from Google all these and more factors need to be understood and then optimised.