Search Engine Optimization

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The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.
The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.
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On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors</h3>
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On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors
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Revision as of 01:04, 5 January 2011

Contents

What is Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a marketing strategy used to improve the ranking of a web page in the organic or unpaid section of online search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Naver, and others. This is different from the paid search campaigns which is sometimes referred as the Search Engine Marketing.

As part of any SEO strategy webmasters uses various techniques of webpage design to improve the likelihood of that page coming on top when a person executes a search with specific keywords. Most popular search engines ranks webpages and not websites using a method called indexing to determine which webpages shows up at top for specific keywords.

As a marketer responsible for digital or online marketing it is important that your organization’s pages appear at top of search queries. It is estimated that the click through rate (CTR) for natural sections of search engines is 75% compared to 25% for the paid sections[1]. In addition, 63% of the clicks are performed on the top three search results[2]. Therefore, if an organization’s links are not appearing at the top of search results people are not going to find its products or services.

It is important to note that people often don’t make online purchase decisions by clicking on the unpaid section of search engines. Therefore, the unpaid sections have been viewed as an important area to promote the awareness of a company’s products or services. It is essential that an organization prioritizes the online metrics that it want to drive through its SEO strategies.

Other areas to improve SEO objectives are videos, images, podcasts, news, PDFs. All these different web contents need slight adjustments to improve the SEO performance.

SEO is also commonly used as an acronym for Search Engine Optimizers. These are consultants or service providers who can help their client to improve their webpage pagerank[3].

Image:20101127.png‎


Following is the 7 largest search engines engine ratings on the global usage.[4]

1. Google 55.2%

2. Yahoo 21.7%

3. MSN Search 9.6%

4. AOL Search 3.8%

5. Terra Lycos 2.6%

6. Altavista 2.2%

7. Askjeeves 1.5%

Techniques to improve SEO

From Google’s standpoint, pagerank of a webpage is dependent on the following factors:

  • The age of the domain and the relevance of its content. It is based on the premise that stable webpages are more trustworthy.
  • The number of other sites linked to the webpage. When a number of websites are referring to a webpage it is taken as a vote of confidence.

Therefore, webmasters uses the following techniques to improve SEO. It is estimated that 25% of the SEO can be attributes to on-page techniques and 75% to off-page techniques.

On-Page SEO

  • Title tags, meta data and URLs
  • Content
  • Internal linking (helping the spiders find your site)
  • Blogs

Off-Page SEO (factors outside your site affecting ranking)

  • Link-building
  • Getting new Links
  • Link bait
  • Blogs
  • Social media


Other Types of Search Engine Optimization

SEO isn’t just for regular websites and the big three search engines. There are other types to optimize web site for local and mobile search, as well as social media.


Most commonly used SEO terminologies:

Google optimization

The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.

On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors

  1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

    66% very high importance
    66%
    8% moderate consensus

  2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag

    63% high importance
    63%
    11.3% light consensus

  3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)

    60% high importance
    60%
    11.2% light consensus

  4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag

    49% moderate importance
    49%
    10.2% light consensus

  5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page

    47% moderate importance
    47%
    13% moderate contention

  6. Keyword Use in External Link Anchor Text on the Page

    46% moderate importance
    46%
    13.6% moderate contention

  7. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) in the H1 Tag

    45% moderate importance
    45%
    11.7% light consensus

  8. Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page

    45% moderate importance
    45%
    9.9% light consensus

  9. Keyword Use in the Subdomain Name (e.g. keyword.seomoz.org)

    42% low importance
    42%
    9% light consensus

  10. Keyword Use in the Page Name URL (e.g. seomoz.org/folder/keyword.html)

    38% low importance
    38%
    9.1% light consensus

  11. Keyword Use in the Page Folder URL (e.g. seomoz.org/keyword/page.html)

    37% low importance
    37%
    8.6% light consensus

  12. Keyword Use in other Headline Tags (<h2> – <h6>)

    35% low importance
    35%
    8% light consensus

  13. Keyword Use in Image Alt Text

    33% minimal importance
    33%
    8.7% light consensus

  14. Keyword Use / Number of Repetitions in the HTML Text on the Page

    33% minimal importance
    33%
    10.3% light consensus

  15. Keyword Use in Image Names Included on the Page (e.g. keyword.jpg)

    33% minimal importance
    33%
    8.6% light consensus

  16. Keyword Use in <b> or <strong> Tags

    26% minimal importance
    26%
    7.6% moderate consensus

  17. Keyword Density Formula (# of Keyword Uses ÷ Total # of Terms on the Page)

    25% minimal importance
    25%
    9.8% light consensus

  18. Keyword Use in List Items <li> on the Page

    23% very minimal importance
    23%
    9.5% light consensus

  19. Keyword Use in the Page’s Query Parameters (e.g. seomoz.org/page.html?keyword)

    22% very minimal importance
    22%
    7.6% moderate consensus

  20. Keyword Use in <i> or <em> Tags

    21% very minimal importance
    21%
    8.4% light consensus

  21. Keyword Use in the Meta Description Tag

    19% very minimal importance
    19%
    9.9% light consensus

  22. Keyword Use in the Page’s File Extension (e.g. seomoz.org/page.keyword)

    12% very minimal importance
    12%
    8.3% light consensus

  23. Keyword Use in Comment Tags in the HTML

    6% very minimal importance
    6%
    5.7% moderate consensus

  24. Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag

    5% very minimal importance
    5%
    5.5% moderate consensus

Comments on On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors:

  • Andy Beal – Keyword use in external link anchor text is one of the top SEO factors overall. I’ve seen sites rank for competitive keywords—without even mentioning the keyword on-page—simply because of external link text.

  • Andy Beard – Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag – ignore them unless using a blogging platform which can use the same keywords as tags. Google ignores them.

  • Christine Churchill – Taking the time to create a good title tag has the biggest payoff of any on-page criteria. Just do it!

  • Duncan Morris – It’s worth pointing out that even though having keywords in the meta description doesn’t impact rankings they can play a significant role in the sites click through rate from the SERPs.

  • Peter Wailes – Domain name keyword usage gains most of its strength through what anchor text people are then likely to link to you with, not so much from inherent value, which is lower in my opinion.

On-Page (Non-Keyword) Ranking Factors

  1. Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page

    65% very high importance
    65%
    9.2% moderate consensus

  2. Recency (freshness) of Page Creation

    50% moderate importance
    50%
    10.5% moderate consensus

  3. Use of Links on the Page that Point to Other URLs on this Domain

    41% low importance
    41%
    12.6% moderate contention

  4. Historical Content Changes (how often the page content has been updated)

    39% low importance
    39%
    10.9% moderate consensus

  5. Use of External-Pointing Links on the Page

    37% low importance
    37%
    13.3% moderate contention

  6. Query Parameters in the URL vs. Static URL Format

    33% minimal importance
    33%
    11.8% moderate consensus

  7. Ratio of Code to Text in HTML

    25% minimal importance
    25%
    11% moderate consensus

  8. Existence of a Meta Description Tag

    22% very minimal importance
    22%
    11% moderate consensus

  9. HTML Validation to W3C Standards

    16% very minimal importance
    16%
    9.3% moderate consensus

  10. Use of Flash Elements (or other plug-in content)

    13% very minimal importance
    13%
    10.1% moderate consensus

  11. Use of Advertising on the Page

    11% very minimal importance
    11%
    8.6% moderate consensus

  12. Use of Google AdSense (specifically) on the Page

    8% very minimal importance
    8%
    7.3% moderate consensus

Comments on On-Page (Non-Keyword) Ranking Factors:

  • Russell Jones – If Google only ranked the “tried and true”, their results would be old and outdated. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to come by.
  • Tom Critchlow – Factors like recency (freshness) and content changes are difficult factors to pin down. A fresh page is a real asset if trying to rank for fresh queries and when QDF hits in but other times having an established page can be more of a benefit so sometimes you need one and sometimes you need the other.
  • Peter Meyers – Anecdotally, it feels like freshness is more important than ever. I’m amazed how often a blog post ranks within the first day, holding a top-10 position before finally settling a few spots (or even pages) lower.
  • Carlos Del Rio – HTML Validation is not necessary, but running validation is an easy way to catch broken code that can trap spiders. If you are not linking out at all you are sending a signal that you are not part of the Internet as a whole. Creating topical association is very important to maintaining a strong position.
  • Ian Lurie – Ratio of code to text and HTML Validation don’t have direct impacts, but by focusing on these factors you create semantically correct markup and fast-loading, content-rich pages, which has a huge impact. The description tag and static/non-static URLs won’t impact rankings. But they do impact click-through on your listing once you see it. So I’m not suggesting you ignore your description tag or use messy URLs. But when you change them, expect more clicks for the rankings you have, not better rankings.

Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors

  1. Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from External Links

    73% very high importance
    73%
    6.4% moderate consensus

  2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)

    71% very high importance
    71%
    9.2% moderate consensus

  3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)

    67% very high importance
    67%
    8.5% moderate consensus

  4. Page-Specific TrustRank (whether the individual page has earned links from trusted sources)

    65% very high importance
    65%
    8.7% moderate consensus

  5. Iterative Algorithm-Based, Global Link Popularity (PageRank)

    63% high importance
    63%
    8.8% moderate consensus

  6. Topic-Specificity/Focus of External Link Sources (whether external links to this page come from topically relevant pages/sites)

    58% high importance
    58%
    10.6% moderate consensus

  7. Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from Internal Links

    55% high importance
    55%
    9.9% moderate consensus

  8. Location in Information Architecture of the Site (where the page sits in relation to the site’s structural hierarchy)

    51% moderate importance
    51%
    10.7% moderate consensus

  9. Internal Link Popularity (counting only links from other pages on the root domain)

    51% moderate importance
    51%
    9.1% moderate consensus

  10. Quantity & Quality of Nofollowed Links to the Page

    25% minimal importance
    25%
    10.8% moderate consensus

  11. Percent of Followed vs. Nofollowed Links that Point to the Page

    17% very minimal importance
    17%
    11.4% moderate consensus

Comments on Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors:

  • Jon Myers – SEO ranking for me is won in the external factors today. It is the old 80%/20% rule and time needs to be invested in the getting your linkage right as this is where you will win. Make sure you are focusing the keyword anchor text and directing to the relevant pages. The focus has to be towards a quality and quantity mix and also don’t get all your links from one type of source, make sure you have a blend as this I believe counts well for you as well.

    Use PR rank to determine high ranking links but make sure they are relevant is always a good starting point to refine the links and clean out the bad ones and refocus the anchor text on the good ones as I tend to find that more often than not about 85% of external links will have brand keywords as anchors, so you could be missing some great opportunities. Never forget though ones the bots are there make sure the internal linkage is good as it counts for a lot!

  • Russell Jones – The Link is King. All Hail the Link.

  • Hamlet Batista – Sub-optimized pages with many incoming links outrank easily their well optimized but poorly linked counterparts.

  • Todd Malicoat – Links are to SEO's what Snowflakes are to Eskimos. Off page factors were the most significant change in search relevancy that lead Google to become the 800 lbs. gorilla that they are. Focus on this area, and understanding the difference between different links and their relationship to search result sets, and you will understand the crux of good SEO. Understand how to place a value on link equity of a site, and you have a very powerful skill in evaluating competition in a search result.

  • Jane Copland – I certainly don’t put much merit in the idea that the number of followed vs. nofollowed links pointing at a page plays a part in Google’s traditional web search results anymore. Think of all the really high-quality social links from sites like Twitter that carry nofollow tags: it would be completely ridiculous to regard a high number of nofollowed links as a detrimental trust metric.

  1. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

    66% very high importance
    66%
    9.5% light consensus

  2. Global Link Popularity of the Domain Based on an Iterative Link Algorithm (e.g. PageRank on the domain graph, Domain mozRank, etc.)

    64% high importance
    64%
    11% light consensus

  3. Link Diversity of the Domain (based on number/variety of unique root domains linking to pages on this domain)

    64% high importance
    64%
    9.5% light consensus

  4. Links from Hubs/Authorities in a Given Topic-Specific Neighborhood (as per the “Hilltop” algorithm)

    64% high importance
    64%
    10.9% light consensus

  5. Temporal Growth/Shrinkage of Links to the Domain (the quantity/quality of links earned over time and the temporal distribution)

    52% moderate importance
    52%
    9.5% light consensus

  6. Links from Domains with Restricted Access TLD Extensions (e.g. .edu, .gov, .mil, .ac.uk, etc.)

    47% moderate importance
    47%
    13.8% moderate contention

  7. Percent of Followed vs. Nofollowed Links that Point to the Domain

    21% very minimal importance
    21%
    11% light consensus

Comments on Site-Wide Link-Based Ranking Factors:

  • Carlos Del Rio – There’s likely to be a tipping point with Nofollowed links vs. Followed links to the domain where it’s not a factor unless the tipping point is reached where there are too many Nofollowed links. Then it has a Negative impact.

  • Will Critchlow – Temporal growth of links above and beyond the value of the links themselves tends to only have a positive impact on QDF-type queries in my experience.

  • Aidan Beanland – Google have stated in the past that .edu, .mil and .ac TLD extensions do not inherently pass any more value than others, but that alternative factors may make this seem to be the case.

  • Ann Smarty – Domain strength is a highly important factor (still). We keep seeing pages with 0 strength of their own hosted on reputable domains ranked very high for very competitive words.

  • Lisa D Myers – I do think the distance between trusted domains and you could have an impact, the bots are becoming more intelligent with their reading and will take associations of domains with them as they go to compare to the next site it links to. Using LSI (Latent Symantic Indexing) was just the start for the search engines, I belive the algorithm is now so much more sophisticated and has the power to read not only latent symantic between content on a page but between sites. My mind boggles when I think about the process, it’s a bit like when you were little and tried to imagine the end of the universe! Again it comes down to content, if you generate highly valuable and relevant content the brilliant links will come to you. I know, I know, it’s such a cliche, but unfortunately true. If links are the currency of the web, content is the bank!

  1. Site Architecture of the Domain (whether intelligent, useful hierarchies are employed)

    52% moderate importance
    52%
    13% moderate contention

  2. Use of External Links to Reputable, Trustworthy Sites/Pages

    37% low importance
    37%
    10.8% moderate consensus

  3. Length of Domain Registration

    37% low importance
    37%
    14.3% moderate contention

  4. Domain Registration History (how long it’s been registered to the same party, number of times renewed, etc.)

    36% low importance
    36%
    12.3% moderate contention

  5. Server/Hosting Uptime

    32% minimal importance
    32%
    11.4% moderate consensus

  6. Hosting Information (what other domains are hosted on the server/c-block of IP addresses)

    31% minimal importance
    31%
    10.4% moderate consensus

  7. Domain Registration Ownership Change (whether the domain has changed hands according to registration records)

    31% minimal importance
    31%
    11.3% moderate consensus

  8. Inclusion of Feeds from the Domain in Google News

    31% minimal importance
    31%
    14.9% moderate contention

  9. Use of XML Sitemap(s)

    29% minimal importance
    29%
    12.3% moderate contention

  10. Domain Ownership (who registered the domain and their history)

    25% minimal importance
    25%
    12.1% moderate contention

  11. Domain Registration with Google Local

    24% very minimal importance
    24%
    12.7% moderate contention

  12. Domain “Mentions” (text citations of the domain name/address even in the absence of direct links)

    24% very minimal importance
    24%
    9.8% moderate consensus

  13. Inclusion of Feeds from the Domain in Google Blog Search

    24% very minimal importance
    24%
    12.8% moderate contention

  14. Citations/References of the Domain in the Yahoo! Directory (beyond the value of the link alone)

    24% very minimal importance
    24%
    12.2% moderate contention

  15. Citations/References of the Domain in DMOZ.org (beyond the value of the link alone)

    23% very minimal importance
    23%
    11.5% moderate consensus

  16. Citations/References of the Domain in Wikipedia (beyond the value of the link alone)

    22% very minimal importance
    22%
    12.4% moderate contention

  17. Use of Feeds on the Domain

    21% very minimal importance
    21%
    10.8% moderate consensus

  18. Citations/References of the Domain in the Librarian’s Internet Index - Lii.org (beyond the value of the link alone)

    21% very minimal importance
    21%
    12.4% moderate contention

  19. Domain Registration with Google Webmaster Tools

    18% very minimal importance
    18%
    11.8% moderate consensus

  20. Activation of Google’s “Enhanced Image Search” (aka image labeler)

    17% very minimal importance
    17%
    10.3% moderate consensus

  21. Use of Security Certificate on the Domain (for HTTPS transactions)

    14% very minimal importance
    14%
    8.5% moderate consensus

  22. Validity of Mailing Address/Phone Numbers/Records from Domain Registration

    13% very minimal importance
    13%
    8.3% moderate consensus

  23. Citations/References of the Domain in Google Knol Articles (beyond the value of the link alone)

    13% very minimal importance
    13%
    9.2% moderate consensus

  24. Use of a Google Search Appliance on the Domain

    6% very minimal importance
    6%
    7.4% moderate consensus

  25. Use of Google AdSense on the Domain

    5% very minimal importance
    5%
    6.1% moderate consensus

  26. Use of Google AdWords for Ads Pointing to the Domain

    5% very minimal importance
    5%
    5.8% moderate consensus

  27. Alexa Rank of the Domain (independent of actual traffic)

    5% very minimal importance
    5%
    5.8% moderate consensus

  28. Compete.com Rank of the Domain (independent of actual traffic)

    5% very minimal importance
    5%
    6.1% moderate consensus

  29. Use of Google’s Hosted Web Apps (not App Engine) on the Domain

    3% very minimal importance
    3%
    4.9% strong consensus

Comments on Site-Wide (non-link based) Ranking Factors:

  • Adam Audette – Many of these factors aren”t directly related to how Google will score a domain for ranking, BUT these all have a huge factor on the SEO of the site. For that reason it was slightly difficult to pull them out one by one. I believe DMOZ is still very juicy. Hint: Google still uses the directory. Double hint: search for “clothing” sometime and see what 2 of the top 10 results are. That’s significant, especially because there’s no ability to get a link on the ranking category page at DMOZ (which feeds Google’s). Citations/mentions/quality directories are certainly tracked and factored in, along with Google’s domain detective work. XML sitemaps can help with crawl fluidity but aren’t a scoring factor per se.

  • Marshall Simmonds – Search engines either don’t care to, are unable, or aren’t good at organic comprehensive crawls of large sites (those in the millions of pages) due to size and depth of content. This means it’s critical to the success of enterprise level sites to implement XML sitemaps whereas smaller sites may not see the benefit as much.

  • Wil Reynolds – Alexa and compete rankings would be of very little value given the prevalence of Google analytics and the Google toolbar. They can get much more accurate data from their own properties.

  • Richard Baxter – Recent changes to Domain Registration Ownership, especially if the domain has been allowed to expire, impact the results extremely negatively.

  • Ian Lurie – Use of Adsense/Google Apps/Google Search or other search engine-owned tools, though, won’t impact results at all. If your site is so hurting, SEO-wise, that you have to point an Adwords ad at it to get crawled, you’ve got bigger problems.

Naver optimization

Case Study: Search Engine Optimization Success Stories:

Suggested Readings

References Test

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