Ranking Factors for SEO
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What factors affect how high your web page will rank in Google? There's a long list, and some of the items on it might surprise you. In this article, we will begin to wade through these factors, explain why they are important, and what you can do to get them working for you. This is the first part of a five-part series.
Internal Link Structure
Internal linking is one of the most important factors that impact search engines rankings. Internal links pass page rank in a fashion similar to external links. If a certain page is cited from many pages, it is considered important. Use of targeted anchor text also plays a role. If you're going after "green widgets," make sure internal links point to that page with "green widgets" as their text for the link.
Age of the Page
This depends on your content model. If you focus on news, then fresh pages are better. If you provide regular content, then the age of the document is computed with an overall relevancy score. There are many other factors to consider, like domain age, link age and number of links, but it can be one of the trust factors.
Explore some search results on Google and you will find many old, poorly designed pages.
External Links
Who you link out, it gives the search engines a clue as to the quality of your pages. If X site links to a bad neighborhood, it will be considered part of that neighborhood and get slapped. Outbound links to quality sites indicate the quality of your content, and are likely used in the relevancy computation.
There are many top-ranking sites that don't link to anyone, so this may only affect newer sites. This is another indicator used in conjunction with other factors. Linking out to quality sources won't get the rankings, but if done with other SEO activity it helps with the overall trust and relevancy score.
Links to spam can get you flagged as spam, so be careful.
Page Updates
This depends on your vertical. If you're after "...your keyword + news," then page updates are essential. If you're providing "cat food" information, it's a different story.
We tried the update trick on a financial website in a very competitive marketplace. The update was on the home page, about 150 words, every day. Our crawl rate was once in several days, but for some reason we kept updating the page every day (it must be the copywriter who sent daily content; what the hell were we supposed to do with it? :-) ). There was no effect on rankings at all.
Frequent page updates may also change content and keywords within tags, which may affect the rankings. There are many top ranking documents in search results that haven't been updated in ages, so it seems this factor is not as crucial on the page level. Updating the site is more important.
Next: Content Quality >>
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