View of Search Engine Optimization Rankings

A great article on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), “Search Engine Ranking Factors v2″ by Rand Fishkin and Jeff Pollard (SEOmoz) at SEOmoz , takes an in-depth look at which efforts affect a website’s SEO efforts. Combining their knowledge with 37 other experts in the field of search engine optimization. Not surprisingly, the highest ranking factor is having your keyword in the title tag. A high ranking factor that affects your search engine ranking is the trust your website has with Google. Links are very important to ranking well in the search engines. Popularity of links, anchor text in links, amount and quality of new inbound links. It is very clear that websites must establish strong link building campaigns coupled with strong keyword implementation in your website.

Detrimental SEO efforts for the most part are pretty obvious. If someone offers you a solution to your SEO problems and it involves the word scheme, I would back off, because your SEO efforts will go down the toilet should you choose to implement this “scheme”. Duplicate content is a large part of falling rankings for websites, and I should know, our company had similar problems with duplicate content. We remedied the problem and are expecting our rankings to rise back to their destined spot in the almighty Google. Websites that use the same meta tags and title tags for every page are also asking for Google to smack them down. The worst thing for your website is if you are on an unreliable server and your website is slow or down.

Controversial factors were also ranked leading to some good debates. At the top of the list is whether or not Google offers manual credits to a website, which would be the only non-automated piece of the algorithm. Debates also arose about the importance of duplicate content, link popularity, and the relevance of a site’s content. Overall this is a great read with a lot of great minds contributing some great information for the SEO community to gobble up.