Many things factor in to where you rank in the search engines. Google has always had a very advanced algorithm for figuring this out and it is constantly changing. You finally think you have it figured out and they will go and make changes to it, leaving you back at square one. The only thing you can do is make sure that you understand the different factors that make up ranking and do your best to satisfy them all as well as you can. There are many factors when deciding on the ranking of a webpage and we’ll cover these now.

No one can know for sure the exact percentage of each factor in the ranking process. SEOMOZ.org sends out a questionnaire to SEO industry experts on a regular basis, which they turn into a report. They ask each of these experts what they believe are the most crucial elements taken into account when Google ranks a webpage. Their opinion is below:

• 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

Most of the factors in this list are things that we can control. If you look at the top three items, accounting for 66% of all the factors that decide where you rank, you will see that it has to do with external links. The trust and authority of your site mostly has to do with back links to your site or page and where the links are from. If it is a fairly authoritative site like cnn.com that is linking to your website, it’s going to make your site have a higher authority then a link from someones random blog. Link popularity is the volume of links pointing to your site or page. If you have 100 links versus 1 link, it’s going to make quite a difference on your ranking. Of course all links are not the same and some will pass great power and others will be weaker. Anchor text of your external links is another big one. Always use the exact keyword you are trying to rank for in your external anchor text. If you don’t, then you are leaving it up to Google to figure out what your page should rank for and we should never do that.

The other items on the list are not as much in our control. We can’t really control Google’s traffic and click through data. We can’t control their social graph metrics. We can control our registration and hosting though. What this usually boils down to is, how quickly does your website load and is it ever down and for how long. If Google try’s to crawl your site and finds that it is down several times, it will most likely effect your rankings since your site is not reliable.

All of the factors that affect where you rank are important. I urge you to do the most you can do for the factors you have control over. The more work you put into these factors the higher and faster you will rank in the search engines.

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