Analyzing Ranking factors

SEOmoz conducted a survey of leading SEOs to determine what these SEOs thought were the most important ranking factors. Following is High level summery of the top nine results:

• Keyword use in title tag
• Anchor text of inbound link
• Global link authority of site
• Age of site
• Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
• Topical relevance of inbound links
• Link popularity of site in topical community
• Keyword use in body text
• Global link popularity of sites that link to the site

Here is a brief look at each of these:

Keyword use in Title tag:
The title tag was clearly considered the #1 ranking factors. The words in the title tag say a lot about the topic of a page (or they should), and it is a useful element for the search engines to key on. One reason is that it is a highly visible element on the web page and therefore is likely to be used, well as a title for the page.

It is also generally accepted that search engine place the most weight on the words that appear at the start of the title. For that reason it is always a good idea to put your most important keywords at the start of the title tag, but make sure to avoid keyword stuffing.

Anchor text of inbound link
When one web page links to another, the anchor text used for that link is also used as a strong signal by the search engines. Webmasters and publishers who choose to link to other web pages from their site often will place keyword-rich anchor text in those links. This has lead to a tremendous focus by link builders in an attempt to get websites to provide keyword-rich text links to their client’s websites.

Global link authority of site
This metric factors the total link authority of the site, as opposed the link authority of a given page on the site. As defined in the SEOmoz survey, it is intended to capture the quantity and quality of site’s links. There are three quick ways to get a general sense of this:

• Look at the Page Rank for the home page of the domain. Although the original PageRank algorithm is flawed, it can still provide a general sense of the site’s global link popularity (one area where this is weak is that it will not give you a sense of the relevance of any of the links). Note, however, that the home page is not always the highest PageRank page on a site.
• Use the Yahoo! Site Explorer search. This will give you a raw count of all inbound links the the domain and allow you to download up to 1,000 results into a spreadsheet.
• Use Links cape’s domain mozRank.

Age of site
The metric often surprises novice SEO practitioners, but there is no question that it is a factor. The reason this makes for a valuable signal is that a site that has been around for a long time must be doing something right in the eyes of the community it is trying to serve. Spammy or poor-quality sites ultimately don’t do as well, so they don’t last as long. In addition, spam was less prevalent in 1998, so sites started in 1998 are less likely to be spam compares to sites started more recently.

Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
Search engines rely on the publisher to tell them what they think is the most important part of their site. For example, a page that can be reached only after five clicks form the home page is probably not important.

On the other hand, a page that is included in the global navigation of the site, and hence ends up being linked to by every page of the site, is clearly one of the more important pages. The relevance of those internal links is also a factor (the more relevance they are better).

Topical relevance of inbound links
The relevance of the sites and pages linking to the target page and the target keyword is a big factor as well. Links from a site on an unrelated topic are still beneficial, but highly relevant links to a site count for a lot more.

Link Popularity of site in topical community
This metric speaks to establishing the authority of your site. if you have many links from members of the topical community, that is very strong vote of confidence for your site.

Keyword use in body text
Search engines also look at the text within the body of a page. Putting the relevant keyword in your title tag is good, but it adds to the impact if the on-page content backs it up. Don’t limit the content to the exact target keyword; the search engines also look for synonyms to further reinforce the relevance of a page to a topic.

Global link popularity of sites that link to the site
Another ranking factor is the importance of the linking site. Id the site a trusted authority in its field? If so, this will probably show up in its Global Link Popularity.