Some people believe Google has 200 rules for ranking websites. If you knew all of them you would be No. 1 for any search term you wanted, and you'd get rich really fast and buy an island somewhere and retire. We'd all like that, so over the last few months, members of the LinkedIn discussion group, SearchEngineLand, have been working to compile this "Magic 200 List." So far they're up to Rule 300, but there are duplicates, and a few silly ones (some of us doubt if Google really cares who you vote for), so here are the best 173.
I've split the list into a positive and a negative group. Positive factors will improve your rank, while negative factors will decrease it (or get your site blacklisted). Both groups are further divided into five categories: code, copy, site, links, and behavior. Code factors relate to how the site is coded, plus some aspects of server admin and ancillary files such as XML sitemaps. Copy factors are about the visible copy people read, but the most important rule is merely this: relevant content and lots of it! Site factors relate to the domain and hosting arrangements. For example, just like buying a car, do you know what people did with that domain name before you bought it? Does it come with a reputation? Link factors are for the link-building fraternity (internal link structures are in the code section). Finally, behavior is about how people react to your site (including Google staff, who are people too). Yes -- Google is watching, and how people react to your site affects your listings.
There is no way of knowing how many of these factors really do matter, or if there are others. Personally, I think most are correct, and all of them are worth serious consideration. If you're in the SEO business, you might want to test how many of these are in your toolkit. Some of these factors are simple, such as having search terms in the <TITLE> tag, whereas others are really only the heading of an entire chapter of skills, such as having search terms in prominent locations in your copy. Space prevents going into detail on any factor, but you should be able to research anything that isn't self-explanatory. You are unlikely to agree with all of these, but hopefully there are a few tricks you haven't thought of.
One clear lesson emerges from this list, which has been compiled by people from all over the world in a variety of fields, not just SEO. The lesson is this: If your SEO people aren't talking to your coders or your writers (or better still, supervising them), you're in trouble.
Factors that improve search engine results:
Code
1) Search terms in the <TITLE> tag
2) Search terms in <B> or <STRONG>
3) Search term in anchor text in links to a page
4) Search term in image names
5) Search term in image ALTs
6) Search terms the first or last words of the Title Tag
7) Search terms in the page name URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/folder/searchterm.html)
8) Use of hyphen ("-") or underscore ("_") in search terms in URL (for example, search-term.htm is better than searchterm.htm)
9) Search terms in the page folder URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/search-term/page.html)
10) Search terms in the first or last words in the H1 Tag
11) Search terms in other <H> tags
12) Search terms in the page's query parameters (e.g. acme.co.uk/page.html?searchterm)
13) Search terms (and location) in the meta-description tag
14) XML sitemap
15) XML sitemap under 10k
16) Accuracy of XML sitemap
17) Sitemap folder geo-targeting
18) Index/follow meta tags
19) Robots.txt present
20) URL length
21) Title attribute of link
22) W3C-compliant html coding
23) Video header and descriptions
24) Video sitemap
25) Compression for size by eliminating white space, using shorthand notation, and combining multiple CSS files where appropriate. GZIP can be used
26) Use CSS sprites to help consolidate decorative images
27) No redirection to other URLS in the same server
28) <NOSCRIPT> tags (even though I don't know anyone who doesn't have JavaScript enabled)
29) Geo-meta tags if the business serves a targeted geographic area
30) Relevance of <TITLE> tag to page content
31) Relevance of <META DESCRIPTION> to page content
32) Code-to-text ratio
33) Canonical URL
34) Directory depth
35) Number of query-string parameters
36) Link attributes -- like rel=nofollow
37) Link structure
38) Microformats
39) Mobile accessibility
40) Page size
41) Page accessible
42) Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has)
43) ALT Image Meta Tags (this can be helpful for FLASH elements too)
44) Age of prominent / 2nd level pages
Copy
45) The most important rule of all: plain old simple quality relevant content
46) Keyword density
47) Keyword proximity -- number of words between search terms (less is better)
48) Keyword positions in page
49) Keyword prominence (start/end of paragraphs or sentences)
50) Words in page
51) Page category (or theme)
52) Relevance (to searched phrase)
53) Synonyms to query terms
54) Language
55) Linear distribution of search terms
56) Legality of content
57) Frequency of updates
58) Standard deviation of search terms in the population of pages containing search terms
59) Semantic relevance (synonym for matching term)
60) Rich snippets
61) Rich snippet UGC rating
62) Search term density through body copy (about 3-5 percent)
63) Search terms in internal link anchor text on the page
64) Search terms in external link anchor text on the page
65) Search terms in the first 50-100 words in HTML on the page
Site
66) Length of contract for ownership of domain name
67) Domain registration information hidden/anonymous
68) Site top-level domain (geographical focus, e.g. .com versus co.uk)
69) Site top-level domain (.com versus .info)
70) Sub domain or root domain?
71) Domain past records (how often it changed IP)
72) Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed)
73) Domain IP
74) Domain external mentions (non-linked)
75) Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools
76) Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools
77) Domain presence in Google News
78) Domain presence in Google Blog Search
79) Use of the domain in Google Analytics
80) Server geographical location
81) Server reliability/uptime
82) PageRank of a page (the actual PageRank, not the toolbar PageRank)
83) The PageRank of the entire domain
84) The speed of the website
85) Reputable hosting company
86) Geo-located results
87) Search terms in the root domain name (searchterm.com)
88) An active Adsense campaign
89) Domain age (older is better)
90) The number of pages on the topic related to the search term
91) Wikipedia listing?
92) Listed in DMOZ?
93) Number of pages within site (more is better)
94) Website size (bigger is better)
Links
95) Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to other pages of this site)
96) Quality of link partners
97) Diversity of link partners
98) Links from good directories
99) Rate of new inbound links to your site
100) Relevance of inbound links -- subject-specific relationship with target page
101) Placement of back-links in page
102) Quantity of back-links
103) Quantity of linking root domains
104) Quality of linking root domains
105) Link distance from higher authority sites
106) Outgoing followed links from back-linked pages
107) Domain classification of linking domains
108) Outbound links with keywords
109) PageRank of outbound link targets
Behavior
110) SERP click-through rate. If your website is ranked No. 1 for "bike shoes" but 90 percent of the traffic goes to the website ranked No. 2, Google will notice and make an adjustment
111) Search trend data
112) Social graph fans (they like/follow you)
113) Social graph fans earned impressions (they talk about you)
114) Social graph fans earned impressions with links (talk about and cite your content)
115) Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions
116) Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions (retweets, likes of friends)
117) Other citations (social media linking)
118) Visits (personalization)
119) Visits (scraped from Alexa)
120) Number of SERP click-throughs
121) Visitors' demographics
122) Visitors' browsing habits (what other sites they tend to visit)
123) Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spikes in incoming traffic)
124) User experience -- "human raters" -- a large number (thousands) of Google employees are there solely to check and manually tweak search results.
Factors that can reduce your search results:
Code
125) Lack of designed 404 page
126) Number of links a page is from homepage
127) Server calls, images, JavaScript, database calls (affects speed of website)
128) Badly done redirects
129) Duplicate title/keywords
130) Redirect through refresh meta tags
131) Dynamic pages
132) Links with "?" in them
133) Use of frames
134) Use of cookies
135) Excessive cross linking
136) Cloaking
137) Excessive use of graphics
138) JavaScript navigation (Googlebot can't run JavaScript)
139) Comment spamming
140) Use of display none within CSS
141) Use of -9999px within CSS
142) Use of absolute positioning
143) Use of tables
144) Use of the <blink>tag
145) Slow site architecture. If your site build is in such a manner that the robots can't crawl it without losing too much time, some pages won't get indexed
146) Deep site architecture. The further down a page is, the less chance it will get found. If it is found, it will be visited less often
147) Duplicate tags on site
148) Number of links on page (too many will affect adversely)
149) Page file size/load time
Copy
150) Hidden content or font colors within 10 percent of background color RBG value
151) Poison words
152) Keyword stuffing
153) Doorway pages
154) Keyword saturation
155) Use of words relating to porn
156) Saying anything remotely negative about Google
157) Duplicate content on site. Google is "understanding" about ecommerce sites that have duplicate content for multiple products -- it will pick one at random and dump the rest, but you won't be penalized
Site
158) Over-optimization. If you match what Google is looking for too well, Google will assume you did it just to get better listings and you'll be penalized. Google considers tuning your site for better listings unethical
159) Linking between all the domains hosted on same IP
160) Multiple redirects
161) Multiple domains to the same website (different country variations are acceptable, but not multiple totally different domains, for example newcars.com, sportscars.com, and fastcars.com pointing at the same site)
162) IP address (many are blacklisted for spamming)
163) Whether the site has been previously de-indexed due to malpractice
164) Domain IP neighbors (if they have a bad reputation)
Links
165) Participation in link schemes
166) Link to a bad neighborhood
167) Traffic buying
168) Link buying
169) Being linked to by a site Google dislikes (you'll be punished by association)
Behavior
170) Automatically playing audio or video
171) Unsecured payment gateways
172) Percentage of SERP click-throughs that return to SERP page in a short time (sort of bounce rate)
173) Google staff finds your site doesn't match what is in the Google cache
Written By Brandt Dainow
I've split the list into a positive and a negative group. Positive factors will improve your rank, while negative factors will decrease it (or get your site blacklisted). Both groups are further divided into five categories: code, copy, site, links, and behavior. Code factors relate to how the site is coded, plus some aspects of server admin and ancillary files such as XML sitemaps. Copy factors are about the visible copy people read, but the most important rule is merely this: relevant content and lots of it! Site factors relate to the domain and hosting arrangements. For example, just like buying a car, do you know what people did with that domain name before you bought it? Does it come with a reputation? Link factors are for the link-building fraternity (internal link structures are in the code section). Finally, behavior is about how people react to your site (including Google staff, who are people too). Yes -- Google is watching, and how people react to your site affects your listings.
There is no way of knowing how many of these factors really do matter, or if there are others. Personally, I think most are correct, and all of them are worth serious consideration. If you're in the SEO business, you might want to test how many of these are in your toolkit. Some of these factors are simple, such as having search terms in the <TITLE> tag, whereas others are really only the heading of an entire chapter of skills, such as having search terms in prominent locations in your copy. Space prevents going into detail on any factor, but you should be able to research anything that isn't self-explanatory. You are unlikely to agree with all of these, but hopefully there are a few tricks you haven't thought of.
One clear lesson emerges from this list, which has been compiled by people from all over the world in a variety of fields, not just SEO. The lesson is this: If your SEO people aren't talking to your coders or your writers (or better still, supervising them), you're in trouble.
Factors that improve search engine results:
Code
1) Search terms in the <TITLE> tag
2) Search terms in <B> or <STRONG>
3) Search term in anchor text in links to a page
4) Search term in image names
5) Search term in image ALTs
6) Search terms the first or last words of the Title Tag
7) Search terms in the page name URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/folder/searchterm.html)
8) Use of hyphen ("-") or underscore ("_") in search terms in URL (for example, search-term.htm is better than searchterm.htm)
9) Search terms in the page folder URL (e.g. acme.co.uk/search-term/page.html)
10) Search terms in the first or last words in the H1 Tag
11) Search terms in other <H> tags
12) Search terms in the page's query parameters (e.g. acme.co.uk/page.html?searchterm)
13) Search terms (and location) in the meta-description tag
14) XML sitemap
15) XML sitemap under 10k
16) Accuracy of XML sitemap
17) Sitemap folder geo-targeting
18) Index/follow meta tags
19) Robots.txt present
20) URL length
21) Title attribute of link
22) W3C-compliant html coding
23) Video header and descriptions
24) Video sitemap
25) Compression for size by eliminating white space, using shorthand notation, and combining multiple CSS files where appropriate. GZIP can be used
26) Use CSS sprites to help consolidate decorative images
27) No redirection to other URLS in the same server
28) <NOSCRIPT> tags (even though I don't know anyone who doesn't have JavaScript enabled)
29) Geo-meta tags if the business serves a targeted geographic area
30) Relevance of <TITLE> tag to page content
31) Relevance of <META DESCRIPTION> to page content
32) Code-to-text ratio
33) Canonical URL
34) Directory depth
35) Number of query-string parameters
36) Link attributes -- like rel=nofollow
37) Link structure
38) Microformats
39) Mobile accessibility
40) Page size
41) Page accessible
42) Page internal popularity (how many internal links it has)
43) ALT Image Meta Tags (this can be helpful for FLASH elements too)
44) Age of prominent / 2nd level pages
Copy
45) The most important rule of all: plain old simple quality relevant content
46) Keyword density
47) Keyword proximity -- number of words between search terms (less is better)
48) Keyword positions in page
49) Keyword prominence (start/end of paragraphs or sentences)
50) Words in page
51) Page category (or theme)
52) Relevance (to searched phrase)
53) Synonyms to query terms
54) Language
55) Linear distribution of search terms
56) Legality of content
57) Frequency of updates
58) Standard deviation of search terms in the population of pages containing search terms
59) Semantic relevance (synonym for matching term)
60) Rich snippets
61) Rich snippet UGC rating
62) Search term density through body copy (about 3-5 percent)
63) Search terms in internal link anchor text on the page
64) Search terms in external link anchor text on the page
65) Search terms in the first 50-100 words in HTML on the page
Site
66) Length of contract for ownership of domain name
67) Domain registration information hidden/anonymous
68) Site top-level domain (geographical focus, e.g. .com versus co.uk)
69) Site top-level domain (.com versus .info)
70) Sub domain or root domain?
71) Domain past records (how often it changed IP)
72) Domain past owners (how often the owner was changed)
73) Domain IP
74) Domain external mentions (non-linked)
75) Geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster Tools
76) Domain registration with Google Webmaster Tools
77) Domain presence in Google News
78) Domain presence in Google Blog Search
79) Use of the domain in Google Analytics
80) Server geographical location
81) Server reliability/uptime
82) PageRank of a page (the actual PageRank, not the toolbar PageRank)
83) The PageRank of the entire domain
84) The speed of the website
85) Reputable hosting company
86) Geo-located results
87) Search terms in the root domain name (searchterm.com)
88) An active Adsense campaign
89) Domain age (older is better)
90) The number of pages on the topic related to the search term
91) Wikipedia listing?
92) Listed in DMOZ?
93) Number of pages within site (more is better)
94) Website size (bigger is better)
Links
95) Page external popularity (how many external links it has relevant to other pages of this site)
96) Quality of link partners
97) Diversity of link partners
98) Links from good directories
99) Rate of new inbound links to your site
100) Relevance of inbound links -- subject-specific relationship with target page
101) Placement of back-links in page
102) Quantity of back-links
103) Quantity of linking root domains
104) Quality of linking root domains
105) Link distance from higher authority sites
106) Outgoing followed links from back-linked pages
107) Domain classification of linking domains
108) Outbound links with keywords
109) PageRank of outbound link targets
Behavior
110) SERP click-through rate. If your website is ranked No. 1 for "bike shoes" but 90 percent of the traffic goes to the website ranked No. 2, Google will notice and make an adjustment
111) Search trend data
112) Social graph fans (they like/follow you)
113) Social graph fans earned impressions (they talk about you)
114) Social graph fans earned impressions with links (talk about and cite your content)
115) Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions
116) Secondary fan connection citations earned impressions (retweets, likes of friends)
117) Other citations (social media linking)
118) Visits (personalization)
119) Visits (scraped from Alexa)
120) Number of SERP click-throughs
121) Visitors' demographics
122) Visitors' browsing habits (what other sites they tend to visit)
123) Visiting trends and patterns (like sudden spikes in incoming traffic)
124) User experience -- "human raters" -- a large number (thousands) of Google employees are there solely to check and manually tweak search results.
Factors that can reduce your search results:
Code
125) Lack of designed 404 page
126) Number of links a page is from homepage
127) Server calls, images, JavaScript, database calls (affects speed of website)
128) Badly done redirects
129) Duplicate title/keywords
130) Redirect through refresh meta tags
131) Dynamic pages
132) Links with "?" in them
133) Use of frames
134) Use of cookies
135) Excessive cross linking
136) Cloaking
137) Excessive use of graphics
138) JavaScript navigation (Googlebot can't run JavaScript)
139) Comment spamming
140) Use of display none within CSS
141) Use of -9999px within CSS
142) Use of absolute positioning
143) Use of tables
144) Use of the <blink>tag
145) Slow site architecture. If your site build is in such a manner that the robots can't crawl it without losing too much time, some pages won't get indexed
146) Deep site architecture. The further down a page is, the less chance it will get found. If it is found, it will be visited less often
147) Duplicate tags on site
148) Number of links on page (too many will affect adversely)
149) Page file size/load time
Copy
150) Hidden content or font colors within 10 percent of background color RBG value
151) Poison words
152) Keyword stuffing
153) Doorway pages
154) Keyword saturation
155) Use of words relating to porn
156) Saying anything remotely negative about Google
157) Duplicate content on site. Google is "understanding" about ecommerce sites that have duplicate content for multiple products -- it will pick one at random and dump the rest, but you won't be penalized
Site
158) Over-optimization. If you match what Google is looking for too well, Google will assume you did it just to get better listings and you'll be penalized. Google considers tuning your site for better listings unethical
159) Linking between all the domains hosted on same IP
160) Multiple redirects
161) Multiple domains to the same website (different country variations are acceptable, but not multiple totally different domains, for example newcars.com, sportscars.com, and fastcars.com pointing at the same site)
162) IP address (many are blacklisted for spamming)
163) Whether the site has been previously de-indexed due to malpractice
164) Domain IP neighbors (if they have a bad reputation)
Links
165) Participation in link schemes
166) Link to a bad neighborhood
167) Traffic buying
168) Link buying
169) Being linked to by a site Google dislikes (you'll be punished by association)
Behavior
170) Automatically playing audio or video
171) Unsecured payment gateways
172) Percentage of SERP click-throughs that return to SERP page in a short time (sort of bounce rate)
173) Google staff finds your site doesn't match what is in the Google cache
Written By Brandt Dainow
1 comments:
These are wonderfully fantastic post i ever seen. Thank you so.. much for posting these really awesome blogs.You have given all basic tips and tricks which is necessary for optimization.Each things you explain wonderfully.Hope some good post from your side.
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