Marketing, SEO/PPC03.09.11

Search Engine Algorithms & SEO: What Do They Look For?

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Ever wonder what things affect how your site is indexed and ranked by the search engines? It all boils down to a complicated algorithm that decides how to rank your site. In effect, a search engine is almost like a big voting machine that takes into account the many aspects of a website and decides on the exact spot to place you site.

So what things factor into this decision making?

Below are examples of how each segment of the search engine algorithm (above) is optimized for effectiveness.

Trust & Authority
– Quality of coding
– Site load time
– Quality & quantity of links
– Number of overall quality root domains linking to your website
– Duplicate content issues
– Diverse link profile (interior pages of a website that are linked to)

Link Popularity for a page
– Number of quality root domains pointing to a page

Anchor Text of Inbound Links
– Keyword used in text of a link pointing to a page and variety of uses of that phrase

On-page Keyword Usage
– Best-practices on-page optimization

Traffic & Click-thru Data
– Quality of traffic in regards to a search, time on site, navigation further into a website

Social Graph Metrics
– Quality and quantity of social media engagement, mentions, shares, likes, etc.

Registration & Hosting Data
– Domain age, length of registration and quality of hosting solution