SEO Factors For Improve Search Engine Results

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.

Rules for beating Google