Let us have a look at all the factors that affect your rankings with Yahoo!, Bing, Google and various other engines. There is a whole list of negative, positive as well as neutral factors as they all exist. Generally, all of them apply to Google but some of thema lso apply to Yahoo! and Bing. So continue reading for detailed information.
|
Keywords in <title> tag
| What is written inside the <title> tag is shown in search results as the page title. The title tag must be 6 or 7 words |
Keyword density in document text
| 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. |
Keywords in anchor text
| This is regarded as getting a vote from this site about the keyword in particular. |
Keywords in headings (<H1>, <H2>, etc. tags)
| Keywords in headings count a lot. However, your page should have actual text about the particular keyword. |
Keywords in the beginning of a document
| It is important, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. |
Keywords in <alt> tags
| If you have images on your page, fill in the <alt> tag with some keywords about them. |
Keywords in metatags
| If you are optimizing for Yahoo! or Bing, fill these tags properly. |
Keyword proximity
| Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words. |
Keyword phrases
| It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string |
Secondary keywords
| It is advantageous as there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. |
Keyword stemming
| Different words that stem from the same root are considered as not related and you might need to optimize for all of them. |
Synonyms
| Optimizing for synonyms of the target keywords, in addition to the main keywords. This is good for sites in English, for which search engines are smart enough to use synonyms as well. |
Keyword Mistypes
| This might get you some more traffic but having spelling mistakes on your site does not make a good impression, so you'd better don't do it, or do it only in the metatags. |
Keyword dilution
| When you are optimizing for an extreme amount of keywords, particularly unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be diluted in the text. |
Keyword stuffing
| Any artificially inflated keyword density is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines. |
Anchor text of inbound links
| This is one of the most important factors for good rankings. It is best if you have a keyword in the anchor text. |
Origin of inbound links
| It is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally, sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable. |
Links from similar sites
| It is very useful to have links from similar sites. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community. |
Links from .edu and .gov sites
| These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Moreover, such links are hard to obtain. |
Number of backlinks
| The more backlinks, the better. However, the reputation of the sites that link to you is more important than their number. |
Anchor text of internal links
| This matters, though not as much as the anchor text of inbound links. |
Around-the-anchor text
| The text that is immediately before and after the anchor text also matters because it further indicates the relevance of the link. |
Age of inbound links
| The older the age of the inbound links, the better. Getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them. |
Links from directories
| Links from directories is great, though it strongly depends on which directories. |
Number of outgoing links on the page that links to you
| The fewer, the better for you because this way your link looks more important. |
Named anchors
| Named anchors are useful for internal navigation but are also useful for SEO because you stress additionally that a particular page, paragraph or text is important. |
IP address of inbound link
| It is always better to get links from different Ips as some search engines may discard some links. |
Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites
| This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. |
Many outgoing links
| Having many outgoing links does not get you any benefits in terms of ranking and could even make your situation worse. |
Excessive linking, link spamming
| It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. |
Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites
| Outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to. |
Cross-linking
| Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links back to site A. |
Single pixel links
| When you have a link, that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is clear that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines. |
<Description> metatag
| Use the <Description> metatag to write the description of your site. The metatag sometimes pops in the description of your site in search results. |
<Keywords> metatag
| Keep the metatag reasonably long � 10 to 20 keywords at most. Don't stuff the tag with keywords that you don't have on the page. |
<Language> metatag
| If your site is language-specific, don't leave this tag empty. |
<Refresh> metatag
| The <Refresh> metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site to another. |
Unique content
| Having content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics is a real boost for your site's rankings. |
Frequency of content change
| Frequent changes are preferential. It is great when you continually add new content but it is not so great when you only make small updates to existing content. |
Keywords font size
| When a keyword in the document text is in a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable |
Keywords formatting
| Bold and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. |
Age of document
| Recent documents are favored along with the regularly updated ones.File size Generally, long pages are not favored. You can achieve better rankings if you have 3 short rather than 1 long page on a given topic. |
Content separation
| Content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great but for SEO it is bad because when you have one URL and differing content |
Poor coding and design
| When the design and/or coding of a site is poor, the site might not be indexable at all. |
Illegal Content
| Using other people's copyrighted content without their consent or using content that promotes legal violations can get you kicked out of search engines. |
Invisible text
| This is a black hat SEO practice and you will be penalised when spiders discover that you have texted especially for them but not for humans. |
Cloaking
| Cloaking partially involves content separation because spiders see one page and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page. |
Doorway pages
| One can get the kick from search engines by creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not. |
Duplicate content
| When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. |
JavaScript
| If your main content is displayed through JavaScript, this makes it more difficult for spiders to follow and if JavaScript code is a clutter and spiders cannot follow it; this will absolutely hurt your ratings. |
Images in text
| Having a text-only site is so boring but having many images and no text is also not good. |
Podcasts and videos
| Search engines can't read them with all non-textual goodies, so if you don't have the tapescript of the podcast or the video, it is as if the podcast or movie is not there because it will not be indexed by search engines. |
Images instead of text links
| Using images instead of text links is bad, especially when you do not fill in the tag. Use images for navigation only if this is vital for the graphic layout of your site. |
Frames
| Frames are bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless necessary. |
Flash
| If you use Flash on your site, don't forget to give it an alternative textual description. |
A Flash home page
| Having a Flash home page and no HTML version is a SEO suicide. |
Site Accessibility
| If the site is unaccessible because of broken links, 404 errors, password-protected areas and other similar reasons, then the site simply cannot be indexed. |
Site theme
| The site theme is important for good ranking because when the site fits into one theme, this boosts the rankings of all its pages that are related to this theme. |
File Location on Site
| Files that are located in the root directory or near it tend to rank better than files that are buried 5 or more levels below. |
Domains versus subdomains, separate domains
| Having a separate domain is better – i.e. instead of having blablabla.blogspot.com |
Top-level domains (TLDs)
| All TLD s are different form each other. Some are better than the others. The best ones are the .edu or .org domain. |
Hyphens in URLs
| Hyphens between the words in an URL increase readability and help with SEO rankings. |
URL length
| One should avoid having more than 10 words in the URL. |
Adsense will boost your ranking
| Google does not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. It just boosts your income. |
Adwords will boost your ranking
| Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in anyway. |
Hosting downtime
| It is directly related to accessibility because if a site is frequently down, it can't be indexed. |
Dynamic URLs
| Long dynamic URLs (over 100 characters) are bad and in that case you should use a tool to rewrite dynamic URLs in a better way. |
Session IDs
| Session IDs should not be used for information that you would like to be indexed by spiders. |
Bans in robots.txt
| The nonbanned part is affected if indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned because spiders will come less frequently to a “noindex” site. |
Redirects (301 and 302)
| Redirects can hurt a lot – the target page might not open, or worse – a redirect can be regarded as a black hat technique, when the visitor is immediately taken to a different page. |
anywhere in your new post or old post. 
