Analyzing Ranking Factors

SEOmoz conducted a survey of leading SEOs to determine what these SEOs thought were the most important ranking factors

Here is a high-level summary of the top nine results:

• Keyword use in title tag
• Anchor text of inbound link
• Global link authority of site
• Age of site
• Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
• Topical relevance of inbound links
• Link popularity of site in topical community
• Keyword use in body text
• Global link popularity of sites that link to the site

Here is a brief look at each of these:


Keyword use in title tag

The title tag was clearly considered the #1 ranking factor. The words in the title tag say a lot about the topic of a page (or they should), and it is a useful element for the search engines to key on

It is also generally accepted that search engines place the most weight on the words that appear at the start of the title. For that reason it is always a good idea to put your most important keywords at the start of the title tag


Anchor text of inbound link

When one web page links to another, the anchor text used for that link is also used as a strong signal by the search engines. Webmasters and publishers who choose to link to other web pages from their site often will place keyword-rich anchor text in those links.


Global link authority of site

This metric factors the total link authority of the site, as opposed to the link authority of a given page on the site

There are three quick ways to get a general sense of this:


1- Look at the PageRank for the home page of the domain. Although the original PageRank algorithm is flawed, it can still provide a general sense of a site’s global link popularity (one area where this is weak is that it will not give you a sense of the relevance of any of the links). Note, however, that the home page is not always the highest PageRank page on a site.

2- Use the Yahoo! Site Explorer search. This will give you a raw count of all inbound links to the domain and allow you to download up to 1,000 results into a spreadsheet.


3- Use Linkscape’s domain mozRank.