SEO Consultant Rand Fishkin has conducted a survey type research and analysis about search engines ranking factors at Seomoz Blog. 13 SEO professionals have participated to this survey including Rand Fishkin, and Rand has created nice reports from the survey results.
Rand has grouped the factors which affect search engine rankings as:
* Introduction to Ranking Factors
1. In-Document Factors Affecting Ranking (26)
2. Site Factors Affecting the Value of Hosted Documents (21)
3. Factors Affecting the Value of a Link (25)
4. URL, Technical, Hosting & Server Side Factors (11)
5. Detrimental Ranking Factors (10)
Rand has reported the top 10 ranked factors across the 5 categories as:
Title Tag – 4.57
Anchor Text of Links – 4.46
Keyword Use in Document Text – 4.38
Accessibility of Document – 4.3
Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages – 4.15
Primary Subject Matter of Site – 4.00
External Links to Linking Pages – 3.92
Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – 3.77
Global Link Popularity of Site – 3.69
Keyword Spamming – 3.69
Even though this is basically a survey, and results show the participants’ views, this is a great resource to go through before starting to optimize your sites.
Here’s the full reports, and results of the “Search Engine Factors” survey.
