Low Down on Page Rank
It’s a common affliction: you have a great site, but it isn’t ranking well organically with the search engines. Your design firm told you your site was built “optimized” and at the time you liked how that sounded, however today, you are still on page 59 of search results. Not only is this a frustrating reality, but it is one that makes you wonder:
“Why isn’t my site ranking well?” and…“How is my competitor ranking so well?”
Followed by, “How do the mighty SEO gods determine that I am worthy of page 59, and my competitor page 1?”
The answer is algorithms.
It isn’t knowledge of a deep dark secret, or determined by a toss of a dice, or a competitor’s aggressive practice of counting their lucky stars. It is all, my page 59 friend, in the numbers. To complicate things a little more, these numbers are constantly fluctuating, and responding to the changing world of Internet marketing. But, fortunately for anyone trying to market online, crafty SEO experts are constantly striving to understand these algorithms that seem to never acquire dust.
Every two years, SEOmoz surveys the top SEO experts in the field worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. 2009’s survey included contributors from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Ukraine, the Dominican Republic, among others.
The resulting collective wisdom is a great resource for those who want to understand why their site is struggling to rank with the search engines:
The Top Five Ranking Factors:
- 73% Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links
- 71% External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links)
- 67% Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)
- 66% Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
- 66% Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains
The Overall Ranking Algorithm:
- 24% Trust/Authority of the Host Domain
- 22% Link Popularity of the Specific Page
- 20% Anchor Text of External Links
- 15% On-Page Keyword Usage
- 7% Traffic and Click-Through Data
- 6% Social Graph Metrics
- 5% Registration and Hosting Data
Another piece of valuable information is the negative ranking factors, of which your site may be guilty, without your knowledge:
- 68% Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative Intent
- 56% Link Acquisition from Known Link Brokers/Sellers
- 51% Links from the Page to Web Spam Sites/Pages
- 51% Cloaking by User Agent
- 51% Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility
Source:
SEOmoz Website, 2009. Retrieved November 17, 2009 from http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
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