50 SEO factors that count the most

[ankur420420]

Hi people

Just thought of returning something useful to this great forum which has helped me a lot till now

I was just surfing through the net and found this on Jim's blog and thought that sharing this would be helpful for newbies(atleast few of the points were helpful for me)

50 Search Engine Ranking Factors

1. Keywords in the title of the page
2. Keywords in the headings of the page (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
3. Keywords in domain name
4. Keywords in the file names of the pages, images or any other content
5. Keywords in bold, italics and underlined text
6. Keywords in alt text for the images
7. Keywords in the text of different color/size
8. Variations of keywords on the page (Eg: eat, ate, eaten, eating, eater, etc.)
9. Keyword density on the page
10. Appearance of the keyword in the above half of the page
11. Keywords in the description meta tag
12. Keywords in the keywords meta tag
13. Uniqueness of title, description and keywords with other pages of the site
14. Age of the domain
15. Age of the page
16. TLD of the domain (Eg: .in domains will rank better in google.co.in domain)
17. Hosting location
18. Pagerank of the site
19. Quality of the content (well written, informative, not duplicate)
20. Number of backlinks
21. Quality (PR) of the backlinks
22. Anchor text used for the backlinks
23. Title text (if any) used for the backlinks
24. Age of the backlink
25. Where the backlink appears on the page (top of the pages, bottom of the page)
26. Is the link in-content or exists with other links (pointing to some other site and separated with some specific text [like "," or "|" ])
27. Number of total links on the page which is linking to you
28. Is the theme of the linking page is same as the linked page
29. Relevance of the keyword with the primary subject of the overall website.
30. Website load time (server response time and the size of the page)
31. Availability of the server (those 99.99% uptime things)
32. Outgoing links (to whom are you linking? Are the related?)
33. Number of pages in the site
34. Website navigation and accessibility (reach-ability of all the pages easily)
35. Links to the internal pages (yes, this will improve the ranking of the main page as well if the navigation is correct)
36. How many people come back from the site to the search engine after searching for the keyword (my be Google tracks this with toolbar)
37. Number of internal page links on your pages (not more than 100)
38. Number of external links on your pages (try to minimize)
39. Backlinks from .gov, .edu links (some thinks, its not a factor)
40. Using "-" hyphen (and not "_" underscore) in your file names wherever space is needed.
41. How often the site is updated
42. Duplicate content from other sources (negative effect)
43. Linking to bad sites (called bad neighborhood) (negative effect)
44. Keyword stuff on the pages or over optimization (negative effect)
45. The speed by which new links are building up for a site. Is it consistent over a longer period?
46. Backlinks from DMOZ and Yahoo directory are considered quite valuable.
47. Avoid session identifiers (SID)
48. Deletion of the pages (dead links on the site) without proper 301/302 redirect (negative effect)
49. HTML validation of the document (I am not sure how much effect it makes)
50. History of the domain (did it do anything bad in the past?)


DO TELL IF I MISSED SOMETHING OR SAID SOMETHING WRONG

ALL SUGGESTIONS ARE WELCOMED


thanks
Ankur

 

[Ravager]

Thanks very informative

 

[Bostoncab]

I recently just moved a site from a shared host to a site with dedicated Ip do you think it will have a positive outcome?

 

[robix]

2. Keywords in the headings of the page (h1, h2, h3, etc.)

I don't anything counts much past h2.

Other than that thanks, good information :smokin:

 

[GreyWolf]

It seems to be a pretty good list.
I'd make a few adjustments to some of the points.

2. Keywords in the headings of the page (h1, h2, h3, etc.)
h1 is most important, it should be used but don't over do it. h2 might help in many cases, but again don't overuse it. h3 and farther is probably of little value. The best thing to do with h tags is use them as they are meant to be used as headers for the main points of your content. Doing that correctly should usually involve keywords.

5. Keywords in bold, italics and underlined text
probably not going to help any more than h3. Might help some but probably best not to overdo it.

7. Keywords in the text of different color/size
probably not going to matter much at all.

9. There's actually two things to think about regarding keyword density
a. keyword density in the content of the page
b. keyword density of the overall html page including titles, meta tags, anchor tags, etc.

11. Keywords in the description meta tag
the only effect of keywords in the description tag will be to affect 9b. The se only uses this tag to provide the summary of your page listing in the serp. It's primary value is to attract searchers to click your listing over the others when it shows up in the serp. It's very important to use this tag, but best to target the description totally for a human reader.

12. Keywords in the keywords meta tag
Adwords looks at the tag so it's good to include it for adsense pages. Google doesn't use it for indexing so the only effect on indexing will be due to overall keyword density (9b).

42. Duplicate content from other sources (negative effect)
That's not necessarily true. Duplicate content on multiple pages of the same website may have a negative effect. But duplicate content from other sources isn't always going to be a negative factor. In some cases it can a negative, but in others it might even be beneficial. It really just depends on what kind of project your doing.

a few of the other factors are fairly minimal and should be moved lower on the list. It could have probably been edited to become a top 25 list. If someone were to do all 50 things on this list, at least the ones that can be controlled they would pretty much have everything covered for onpage SEO and some good advice for backlinks. (some things like age of domain isn't always an option to do much about)

Use this list along with other information found on bhw and you'll be heading in the right direction.

 

[qianking88]

Thanks very informative

 

[infoaddicts]

Have question .

Can websites on same host or rather different domains on same ip can ranked be in search engine..Have raised it multiple times on web but yet to receive a concrete answer

Thanks anyway for laundry list .

 

[seovirtualassistance]

Thanks a lot for the SEO factors

 

[GreyWolf]

Have question .

Can websites on same host or rather different domains on same ip can ranked be in search engine..Have raised it multiple times on web but yet to receive a concrete answer

Thanks anyway for laundry list .

Sure. If they couldn't then shared hosting wouldn't be so popular.

Where it can be a problem is if someone has multiple websites all on the same ip and they try using those sites to helps SEO/SEP each other.

In other words, a group of related sites in a network of backlinked sites all on the same IP is more likely to have problems. If it's just a couple sites linking together, or it's a larger group and only a few are linking back and forth it might not be as big a problem. A group of sites hosted on the same ip but not linking to each other at all won't have any problems at all.

 

[infoaddicts]

Sure. If they couldn't then shared hosting wouldn't be so popular.

Where it can be a problem is if someone has multiple websites all on the same ip and they try using those sites to helps SEO/SEP each other.

In other words, a group of related sites in a network of backlinked sites all on the same IP is more likely to have problems. If it's just a couple sites linking together, or it's a larger group and only a few are linking back and forth it might not be as big a problem. A group of sites hosted on the same ip but not linking to each other at all won't have any problems at all.

Very True !

Thanks for clarifying.

 

[strictlykash]

Very helpful list, you know your stuff

 

[SEO Sage]

I remember reading this a couple of years back when I was new to SEO. But sadly I lost the link in a pc wipe soon after. I'm amazed that my third day posting here I found it again! A good idea to all would be to print this out in some format and keep it by your desk as a checklist for SEO! That's what I do with a lot of things. Big thanks Ankur!!

 

[rastan]

don't use the same keyword over and over again this can cause for over optimising penalty

 

[SEO Sage]

don't use the same keyword over and over again this can cause for over optimising penalty

Yes! I believe the best method to avoid that is to mix up your top keywords properly. With good keyword research you can find so many to use! I'm glad I found this again.

This thread is incredibly helpful to newbies as well as SEO vets like me!

 

[ankur420420]

I remember reading this a couple of years back when I was new to SEO. But sadly I lost the link in a pc wipe soon after. I'm amazed that my third day posting here I found it again! A good idea to all would be to print this out in some format and keep it by your desk as a checklist for SEO! That's what I do with a lot of things. Big thanks Ankur!!

Yeah buddy , it would be a good idea to print this and have it as a SEO checklist

Everybody keeps forgetting things anyways

thanks
Ankur

 

[NapsteR]

nice post.. thanks for sharing..

 

[King Maker]

Very useful share man... A good one,it really helps me out well

 

[Ravasz]

It's old, but great share... glad it got bumped so I could check it out.

 

[Androx]

Great list!

For #50 you can use the WayBack machine to check the history of a domain. From what I learned, old, but unused domains are no better than new domains. But old and used domains are good.

In my own test of on-page factors (I got these results so far based on inspiration from another BHW thread):

List of HTML tags enclosing your keyword in order of importance:

[0] => title
[1] => p
[2] => caption
[3] => font
[4] => dt
[5] => textarea
[6] => ins
[7] => b
[8] => cite
[9] => h1
[10] => samp
[11] => div
[12] => strike
[13] => legend
[14] => u
[15] => h4
[16] => strong
[17] => sup
[18] => center
[19] => del
[20] => pre
[21] => h3
[22] => big

But I only ran the test for about a week so far.