Several Search Engine Optimization Factors to Concentrate Your Efforts On

There's no shortage of advice with regards to what folks must do to enhance a site's search engine rankings. Certain people agree, certain people differ, and some people are out-and-out perplexing. You can be extremely suspicious of any advice provided by someone that tells you to use search engine submissions, use traffic exchanges, or use FFA sites. That is so out of date it is not funny.

Not too long ago a well-known selection of SEO experts provided their consensus opinions to SEOmoz on what is relevant for outstanding search engine rankings today.

Given the consensus opinion of the experts, these are the four most important ranking factors for SERPs.

Keywords in the Title Tag

Using the appropriate keywords in the title tag of a web page is very important. Not only does it promote higher search engine rankings, it also assists with better click-through from the SE listings to the web page. It's of reduced value to be high up in the search results without receiving that many clicks. The ultimate purpose should be to gain as many visitors to the site as possible.

Those keywords that were used by the searcher are bolded in the search results. If part of the page title is highlighted, it stands a higher opportunity of being seen and getting a mouse click. Nevertheless, highlighted keywords don't comprise the only element to consider when composing the page title tag.

A smartly composed page title, that invites and entices the web surfer to click through, can result in a lot of extra clicks. It is more advantageous to receive 100 clicks from the 5th position with an eye-catching title compared with fifty clicks from the third listing with a badly written page title, correct?

The Anchor Text of Inbound Links

The anchor text that's employed in the hyperlink that points to your web site from another site weighs heavily in the SE algorithms to figure out what your web site is all about. Additionally, what your web site is all about influences largely what it will rank for in the search results.

If it's possible that you can exert any influence on the anchor text that other web sites use with their links to your site, then it's an extremely prudent investment of your time.

A larger number of web sites that have links to your web site using a specific keyword, or variations of that keyword, will cause the search engines to more easily figure out that your site is focused on that certain keyword.

It is far more advantageous if the content of the page on your site contains that specific keyword and its latent semantic equivalents.

The Overall Link Popularity of the Site

Search engines figure out the relative importance of your site by using the number of hyperlinks that point to the site. They take into account both quality of the hyperlinks and quantity of hyperlinks.

The more distinct web sites that link to your site, the higher the search engines will compute the perceived importance of your web site.

The building of backlinks does not end. One can never have enough backlinks pointing to your website. It's true that it's possible to build links too fast and that could raise some flags in the algorithms of the search engines. But, if done as an ongoing action with a longer term outlook, every link deserves the resources spent in obtaining it. They all add up to an improved deemed importance of your web site.

Internal Link Structure of the Site and Resulting Link Popularity

Naturally, some of your web pages will gain more external backlinks than other pages. Those that do not attract a lot of external backlinks could be the real money pages that you'd wish to rank high in the search engine listings.

Internal linking structure, as well as the anchor text utilized for the internal links, is the way to distribute PageRank inside the perimeters of your site.

Some search engine optimization experts say that an internal link carries the same value as a link from an external page. That does not mean the web site will gain high rankings with nothing more than internal links. What it means is that you could cause a page to be ranked by having internal links pointing to it even though it does not have a lot of external links, on the condition that the rest of the web site has acquired enough PageRank from external links.

In Closing

SEO may seem daunting when one looks at it as a whole. However, when viewed as individual components, there are a select number of comparatively uncomplicated things one can focus on for the biggest gains.

Do you have a WordPress blog? Get search engine optimization and high search engine rankings for your WordPress blog, including a free WordPress search engine optimization plugin.