SellThoseWidgets.com

[Scott]

What influences your seach engine ranking?

I'm sure most folks have the basics of this down to a fine art now (and most have their own opinions), but I thought it was worth putting down in black and white.

So SEO factors for ranking (common ones):

Keyword density
Page title
META info
H1 tags
Bold, Italics
Inbound links
Inbound link text
ALT text
PR (debatable, Google only)
Filename

Other possible factors:

Specific website, engine, directory registrations (DMOZ, Yahoo?)
Internal links to page
Page position in site heirarchy
Freshness of content
On-theme linking
Linking to Google (I'm joking! )

Possible penalty factors:

Excessive keywords
Interlinking
Blog / guestbook spam
Un-indexable pages in your site
Server up time (or rather, downtime)
Sandbox effect

External factors of ranking:

Competing sites
Types of competing sites (.edu, .gov?)
SE updates (fluctuating results)
Major SE changes
Market changes (increased competiton, shift in search habits, etc)

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Any other factors, SEO controllable or not that affect or could affect your ranking?

Anything here that shouldn't be?

How would you rate the stuff here in terms of importance (for different SE's)?

Scott
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JobseekersAdvice.com
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[creative666]

For Google external sites linking to your own site is the most single important thing for ranking, of course they need to be search engine friendly links... no redirects, on pages that are already indexed, on topic to your sites own topic.

The real tough part to crak is that they need to be placed on the page in a natural way, try not to make them look like they have been chucked on there for the purpose of link popularity.

Avoid links.html, link-exchange.html, links-directory.html there is no clear evidence that the engines devalue links from these pages but it is a good idea to keep clear from them.[/list]
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