I frequently hear from small businesses the desire to appear on the first page of Google, which is obvious since studies show that 60-70% of searchers do not go past page one.
With the desire to be on page one so important, let’s take a look at the factors that determine your website’s search engine rankings.
Ranking Criteria
According to a recent study by SEOmoz.org, the four most important criteria that determine your search engine rankings are:
1) Trust/Authority of the pages that are linking to your page
2) Link popularity of the pages that are linking to your page
3) Anchor text of the links pointing to your page
4) On-site keyword factors
Three out of four of the criteria are not even under your direct control because they involve getting links from other sites. From this we can see the benefit of developing a proper inbound linking strategy. This doesn’t just mean getting hundreds of links from free directories, but it means getting quality links from sites that are relevant to your business.
The last point about on-site keyword factors is pretty broad, but we can break it down to a few specific points. The ideas is that search engines should be able to easily understand what a specific web page is about. You can accomplish this by following these basic guidelines:
- Make sure the page name (URL), page title (title tag), and page heading (H1 tag) are as consistent as possible, if not the same.
- Include your relevant keyword phrase within your primary page content, but avoid repeating it too often. If your content sounds weird when reading it aloud, consider making adjustments.
- Include a clear meta description that summarizes your page content and includes your keyword phrase. The meta description is usually the short description that appears under the page name/link on the search engine results pages.
By making sure you adhere to a specific process when creating content, you ensure that your on-site ranking criteria is as optimized as possible. Now, you can focus on your off-site strategy to acquire quality inbound links.
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