Search Engine Ranking Factors

[Calgary Agent]

A cheat sheet of the most important factors for improving your site's ranking:

This document represents the collective wisdom of 34 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value - although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google's algorithm is contained below.

In addition to the ranking factors, at the very end of the document are the results of 4 questions I asked the panelists regarding search rankings at Google. Since I had the attention of such distinguished folks, I couldn't resist getting a few more valuable answers.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#f24

[svrpaul]

Thanks for the post! Great information... especially when building a new site.

[webmaster]

I think a lot of that is contestable, and some just plain inaccurate. Should certainly provide some interesting questions and debate though, and thankfully most of those "experts" decided to err on the side of caution.

[svrpaul]

Personally, I think that all SEO efforts now and in the future is just to be pure and original. How can you be penalized in your efforts for that?

[webmaster]

That's a nice sentiment, but it does not help you when your competition is killing you with low quality volume, you need to find a balance.

Take a simple example like article writing and distribution - You want to get the most out of the 2 hours it takes to write a compelling and unique article, so you submit it to all the article directories you can, let it spread it wings and get found and used. If you wrote a unique article for every directory, you would die before you got to the end of your first round of submissions.

Personally, I think that all SEO efforts now and in the future is just to be pure and original. How can you be penalized in your efforts for that?