Archives

• February 2011 (1)
• January 2011 (1)
• September 2010 (2)
• July 2010 (1)
• June 2010 (1)
• August 2009 (1)
• July 2009 (1)
• June 2009 (3)

The Key Factors Affecting Search Engine Ranking

The key factors affecting site performance in search engine ranking relate to SEO or search engine optimization. There are many factors which affect where your website ranks for a particular search term – several hundred for Google, currently the most widely used search engine. However this post will deal with only the key factors.

Domain name
A key factor in determining ranking for a particular search term is whether the keyword is contained within the URL. e.g. www.7SEO.co.uk contains the search term SEO. For many uncompetitive search terms it is possible to rank highly for a search term exploiting this factor alone. In fact there is a whole industry grown up on exploiting this factor.

Domain Age
Another factor affecting ranking is how old your domain is. If your domain is new i.e. less than two years old this can affect your ranking slightly negatively. Search engines view the website as less well established. If the domain name is less than six months old the factor affects ranking even more so – particularly for competitive search terms. There is another factor widely reported as the ‘Google Sandbox Affect’ and there are other postings on this website that discuss this in more detail.

Website content
The content of your website and it’s relevance is another key factor which search engines measure in order to rank sites. Ultimately search engines measure relevance above all and look to the nature and amount of the content to ascertain where they should rank a particular site for a search term. Broadly speaking the more relevant content that your website has relating to a particular search term the higher it will rank. The creation and alteration of website content to reflect what search engines measure favourably for a particular search term is called ‘On Page Optimisation.’ A well optimised site can often rank well for certain key terms simply because the website and content is structured in such a way as to rank highly among search engines.

Websites Linking to your Site
Links from other websites to your site are another key factor that search engines measure. However, the quality and quantity of links vary greatly. A single link from an authority site such as ‘New York Times’ or the BBC would be valued extremely highly by the search engine. To measure links the search engines crawl websites and follow the link potentially to your site. This is how they determine the ‘Value’ of the link. Other factors relate to how many links are coming form that particular site/page. So not all links have the same ‘value.’ In fact there are a number of techniques which link building companies employ in order to ‘Fool’ the search engines into regarding a particular site as an authority site – these techniques can have a detrimental affect on ranking and are often called ‘Black Hat’ techniques.

Relevant Content that Appears in other Search Engines
Increasingly search engines measure relevant content that links back to your site from other authoritative sources such as Facebook Twitter Youtube Squidoo and Social Bookmarking sites. Relevant content can be placed on these sites that links back to your own site and search engines not only measure the link but can place this content in the search result. Often you will see Youtube videos appearing in the search results for a particular search term. Google is refining this process of when to show content form other search engines in it’s search results.

Portfolio

• 
• 
•