Search Engine Optimization – The 4 Critical Factors That Affect Your Ranking
By Anna Johnson on August 26th, 2008No one, except the search engine themselves, knows exactly what goes into the algorithms that determine where a website ranks in the organic search engine results pages (SERPs).
But there is a general consensus over the four (4) critical factors that affect your ranking. And it’s these factors that you really want to focus your attention on in order to improve your ranking:
1. Domain Age
In general, the older the domain, the higher a website will rank in the SERPs. This is for a number of reasons. One of which is the fact that Google’s patent specifies domain name age as being a factor in how it ranks websites, another being that older domain names (e.g. expired domain names) are likely to have more sites linking to them.
2. Content
The search engines tend to favor websites containing plenty of copy. According to Mark Jackson of Search Engine Watch, you want at least 150 words on a webpage, and this should include a decent smattering of your targeted keywords, which should ideally be within the first paragraph of text, and in your H1 tags.
3. Title Tags
Your webpage title tags should include the keywords targeted for that webpage.
4. Links
Domain age, content and title tags are all necessary… but not sufficient. Getting back links from authoritative and relevant websites is where the real search engine optimization game is at. The more quality back links your website has, the more highly it will rank in the SERPs.
Source: Mark Jackson, “Search Engine Optimization: Back To Basics”, Search Engine Watch, August 19, 2008
