Towards the end of August 2009 SEOMoz published the latest in their bi-annual review of what the top search engine marketers believe to be the most important factors that affect ranking well in the search engines. The top 5 factors for better a Google rank were in descending order of voting:
1. Anchor Text from External Links
I discussed how to form a link in a previous post on anchor text. The more you can control the anchor text of a link coming to your site to contain the keywords you want the page to rank for the better.
For example if you’re trying to help page A get ranked for the term “better Google rank” then you put a link from page B to A, with “better Google rank” in the text, like this: We also offer a service to help you get a <a href=“a.html”> better Google rank</a>.
2. Keyword Use in Title Tag
I have covered this in a previous post however here is one more tip. Put the keywords you want the page to rank for at the beginning of the title tag. There is strong evidence from testing that Google gives priority to the keywords early on in a title tag, especially where those same keywords are found in the article and inbound links to the page.
3. Raw Link Popularity
This is to do with the quantity and quality of external links. The more links you have and the better the quality the more effect they have. A good measure of quality in this context is the Google page rank of the page the link is coming from and the relevance to the link anchor text of the content of that page.
4. Diversity of Linking Domains
The more unique root domains you are getting links from the better. So this means you should post your content to as many places as possible. If you have articles post them to three top directories e.g. eZineArtcles.com, isnare.com and articlesbase.com. If you are posting video do so to multiple video sites e.g. YouTube, Viddler etc. Use Hubpages and Squidoo lenses. Diversity is the key.
5. Keyword Use in Root Domain
If you do a search in Google for Queens of British Pop, you should see in about position 4 or 5 a site at the URL queensofbritishpop.com. Some months ago I bought this domain and just put up an empty WordPress blog in it. No content, just the empty blog. As the keyword is in the root domain you can see just how positively it can affect your Google search results. It is ranking above some very substantial sites just on the keyword being in the root domainalone. (Unfortunately this is not the same in Yahoo or Bing!)
If you want to study the full report, which I strongly recommend you do, you will find it at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors