Understanding and factoring in Search Engine Optimization when you’re posting articles can be a bit daunting. However, there are organizations out there that provide data to help which can help your search engine ranking. Every two years, SEOmoz survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds.
In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document was a useful aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents.
This data is useful when we are trying to work out how to optimize our sites to improve our search engine ranking. It looks at the factors used in search ranking by major search engines, and outlines what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
It’s worth looking at the data to apply it to your own blog, bearing SEO in mind when you post:
Factors that support good search engine rankings:
1. Anchor Text with Keyword from External Links
2. External Link Popularity (Quantity & Quality of External Link)
3. Diversity of Linking Domains
4. Keyword in Title Tag
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains.
Once you understand the principles behind these positive factors, it’s easy enough to bear them in mind for search engine ranking when you post articles. Search engines respond well to well-chosen keywords, quality links to good sites, and a wide variety of diverse links.
Negative factors which lower your ranking:
1. Cloak with Malicious/Manipulative Intent
2. Link from link brokers/seller
3. Link from spam website
4. Cloaking by User Agent
5. Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility.
These are pretty easy to understand – if you are using your site to spam, cloak malicious software or be badly behaved in any way, you’ll lose your credibility. Similarly, badly-built sites with broken links are going to be low-ranking.
Top 5 most contentious factors that put people off:
1. Cloaking by Cookie Detection
2. Cloaking by JavaScript/Rich Media Support Detection
3. Hiding Text with same/similar colored text/background
4. Cloaking by IP Address 15.3% moderate contention
5. Cloaking by User Agent 15.2% moderate contention.
If you don’t know what these are, then great! This report shows that there was very little change from the 2007 search ranking factors. The primary factors in SEO have not changed very much according to SEOmoz, despite the fact that search engines improve their features and technologies continuously.
Hopefully these search ranking factors will help search engine optimizers who are serious about managing positive changes in their sites. By sticking to the rules of good posting, using keywords and links effectively, and steering clear of spam or scams, you will be able to gradually climb up the ladder of the search engine page ranks and get to the top!
A high search engine ranking helps to bring your business to the attention of the people that matter – your existing and potential customers, and service users. SEO data provides us with the information we need to understand how search engine page rankings work, and what we need to do to enhance our own.
(source for data: www.seomoz.org)