No one knows 100% for sure what all the ranking factors are, but we can make some pretty well educated assumptions.
Ranking Factors Explained!
When a search engine returns a set of results in response to a users keyword query, they try to display only the most relevant sites which the user will find most useful. To achieve this relevancy, they use a ranking structure determined by their ranking factors.
Below is a list of some, but not all, ranking factors:
- Use of keywords in the title tag.
- The link popularity of a site.
- Anchor text of incoming links from external sites.
- The sites internal link structure.
- The established age of the site.
- Topic/theme relevance of inbound links.
- The link popularity of site within the topical community.
- The use of keywords throughout the body contents.
- The link popularity of inbound linking site.
- Themed relationship of linking site.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does highlight the prominence of the most widely agreed upon ranking factors that play a major role in how a site will rank.
It is also worth pointing out that ranking factors can have both a positive and negative impact. Whilst getting certain areas of website structure and design right, will have a positive effect on your ranking, getting certain aspects wrong can have a devastating impact. In fact it would be fair to say that negative ranking factors have a proportionally bigger impact sending you down the results pages, than a positive ranking factor would have in the opposite direction going up the results pages.
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