What Are The Most Important Factors For Getting a High Search Engine Ranking?
By Anna Johnson on June 15th, 2011So how DO you get your site to the top spot of the first page of Google, Bing and the other search engines? What are the most important factors for getting a high search engine ranking? What should you spend most of your search engine optimization (SEO) time and budget on in order to increase your organic search engine rankings?
These and similar questions are likely to occupy much of your time and attention as an Internet marketer or search engine marketer. Especially as Google, Bing and the other search engines do their best to maintain the secrecy of their search engine algorithms.
Of course, Google and Bing will tell us not to worry about trying to crack their search engine algorithms and to simply focus on providing good quality, original content. That way we’ll attract an audience, get plenty of ‘natural’ back links and be able to sit back and relax as our sites gradually rise up in the search engine rankings.
Most of us are probably happy to do that… until that inevitable day when we see our web listings eclipsed by some upstart with horrible, derivative content and no back links. What gives? Some black hat SEO voodoo no doubt!
It seems, then, that providing good, quality content is not enough to get a high search engine ranking. Most of us will need to engage in some form of search engine optimization to get an edge, or at least ward off competitors. Which brings us back to the original question:
What can – and should – we do to get higher search engine rankings?
A recent study by SEOMoz provides some helpful clues. The company’s Search Engine Ranking Factors 2011 report indicates the degree to which various factors influence search engine rankings.
Ahhh… if we know which factors most influence search engine rankings, we know which factors to concentrate on in order to boost our search engine rankings.
SEOmoz’s results are based on surveying 132 search marketers, as well as studying correlations between factors and 10,271 keyword search results taken from Google.com (US).
Two key take-outs from the research are:
1. Which factors are highly correlated with and/or are believed to have the most influence on search engine rankings; and
2. How has the influence of various factors on search engine rankings changed between 2009 (the last time the study was performed) and 2011.
Unfortunately, we can’t easily compare the results from 2009 and 2011 since SEOmoz has incorporated more factors into the 2011 data set. On the other hand, that in itself is useful information: more factors affect search engine rankings these days.
So here are the most important factors for search engine rankings in 2011. Consider this list as the order in which you might want to focus your search engine optimization efforts. Below the list are graphical breakdowns of the most important factors in 2011 and 2009 respectively.
- Page Level Link Metrics: 21.45 percent
- Domain Level Link Authority Features: 21.13 percent
- Page Level Keyword Usage: 14.93 percent
- Domain Level Keyword Usage: 10.73 percent
- Page Level Social Metrics: 7.22 percent
- Domain Level Brand Metrics: 6.78 percent
- Page Level Keyword Agnostic Features: 6.74 percent
- Page Level Traffic/Query Data: 6.26 percent
- Domain Level Keyword Agnostic Features: 4.92 percent
For more information about, and explanations of, SEOMoz’s research visit SEOmoz
