Search Engine Page Ranking - Top 10 Factors

PageRank (PR) & Number of inbound links- Incoming links are the biggest factor in SEO. If a page has a lot of incoming links then it could indicate that the page has strong SEO (pending other tests). If a lot of the ranking pages have low amounts of incoming links then this can be a good indicator of low competition for that phrase.

Anchor text in incoming links - Anchor text is the clickable text that brings you to the linked page, i.e. a "click here" links anchor text is "click here".The search engines pay a lot of attention to the anchor text of incoming links when deciding where to rank a page. If a page has more links pointing to it that any other page with the anchor text "Red Widget", then there is a good chance that this page will rank highest for the keyword "Red Widget".

Keyword in domain - Sometimes you will see a website like "xxx.red-widget.com". This can help this site rank for the keyword "red widget". This is partly because Google gives a little preference to it, but largely because when people link to the site without using anchor text, Google will pick up the domain name as the anchor text. This means it gets a lot of extra incoming links with the correct anchor text.

Keyword in title - Google likes to see the keyword being used naturally in the title of a page. If the results you see brought back on the first page do not have the keyword in the titles, then this could indicate that those sites are not optimising for this particular keyword and it could be an easy one to achieve.

Age of links - Google pays attention to the pattern of links being generated. It likes websites that have links that last a long time. If a website was registered several years ago, this could be an indication that some of the links are very old and will carry more sway with Google.

Internal page matching theme of root - Quite often you will see an internal page of a domain ranking in the search engines with little or no links pointed at it. Most likely this is because the root domain has a lot of links pointing at it.

Example internal page: xxx.domain.com/internal.html
Example root page: xxx.domain.com

Usually you will see pages ranking from popular social sites where a user has submitted a page on the subject. These can often be easy to beat, so long as they don't have a good linking structure to that specific page.

301/302 redirect trap - These are search engine friendly re-directs.

301 redirect: Permanent re-directs to indicate a page or site has permanently moved.
302 redirect: Temporary re-direct to show that the page is only moved temporarily.

Search engines understand these re-directs. If they find one they will re-assign whatever ranking value the original location had to the new location. From a competition research perspective these can be extremely annoying as the results you see through the reporting software may not be accurate if they are using the 301/302 re-direct.

Short term rankings - When Google finds new content, sometimes it will rank it highly for a few days before it sends the site down the list. No one knows why this happens but it does. If you see a new site with hardly any links on first page then it could be that Google has just found it and is giving it the initial ranking boost.

Authority domains - If a domain has a lot of unique content on one particular topic and a lot of very high quality aged links going to it, they may give it an "authority status" for certain related keywords.There are a few ways to spot authority domains. If you search for a keyword and two pages are brought back from the same site, usually the index page and an internal page, then this can show the site has an authority status.

Link quality - As mentioned earlier, not all links are equal. There are many things that affect the quality of a link but here are the main ones:

Amount of outgoing links on page: the more links a page holds, the less link juice each links passes on. Ideally you want your links on pages that only have a few outgoing links.

Title on page: If the title of the page that the link originates from, have your desired keyword or a similar keyword in it, then this improves the quality of the link for your SEO.

PageRank of page: Getting links from pages that have a high PageRank value is very desirable. The high PageRank shows that it has a good linking structure going to it and that Google trusts this page.

Index PageRank of page: If page has a PageRank value of 0, but the root domain of the site has a very high PR, then Google will count this link as coming from a trusted source, and give more value to it. This is because Google sees it as coming from a "good neighbourhood".

Jay Germo
Cebu Seo Specialist
http://www.midnightseo.com