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Today's Feature Article

Top 10 SEO Factors Revealed
Michael Campbell

What are the top 10 SEO factors? This question gets asked daily, so I thought I'd provide you the definitive answer. In addition to my tactics, I've asked Jerry West, Ginette Degner and Dave Tropeano for their tips as well.

Here is a brief transcript of that conference call...

Michael: Here's a question from one of the Dynamic Media Vault members about SEO, "I know that Google's algorithm is a secret, but from your observations, what are the most important SEO factors.

In other words, if you could pick the top 10 SEO factors and put them in an order of importance, what would be on that checklist?" OK, how about we each pick three and see what we can come up with. Jerry, what would you say?

Jerry: The number one is links. Google is basically based on links. But one thing that people tend to overlook, is the on-page SEO. People think it's not important and tend not to do it.

In my testing, I've learned that if you get the on-page SEO wrong - no matter how many links you get - you are not going to rank as high as you would, if you took care of the on-page SEO. So let's go with number one being links.

The second most important would be your title tags. It doesn't have the strength that once had in SEO, but if you use your keyword phrase in the title tag, it's going to end up as bolded text in the Google search results. It attracts the eye. So it will get more clicks.

In addition, you want each title tag to be compelling and attract the click. It's just like writing an ad for AdWords. You want to do the same thing with your organic listing in Google. You've got to sell that click.

And third, I'd probably say the heading tags, your H1s, H2s, H3s, make sure you just have one H1. That's the largest one.

You can tinker with the size in your CSS, but what I generally do is I have one H1, a couple of H2s, and I will do an H3 at the bottom of each page. That will give me good coverage.

It also allows my content to be naturally broken up with some good headlines. That way, the reader doesn't get so overwhelmed with content. So those will be my three.

Michael: Excellent. Ginette, what would you say?

Ginette: I'll start with the robots.txt file. It's necessary to have one, so the crawlers know what directories can, or cannot be crawled. In it you can put links to your HTML sitemap and XML sitemap. Both are necessary for speedy and accurate crawling.

The second thing is make sure your pages load fast and that they validate. Meaning that both your HTML and your CSS should validate with the W3 at validator.w3.org.

The third thing I look at is browser compatibility. Jerry can attest to it. He once had an image was that corrupt and it prevented Google from actually spidering a site.

And I've had issues where a clients' site just couldn't get indexed. It turns out that the robots.txt was improperly done.

Once we fixed it, Google was able to crawl the whole site like it's supposed to. But for months, this person just couldn't figure out what was wrong.

So a robots.txt file, code that validates, and browser compatibility. Those would be my three.

Michael: Excellent.

Michael: OK Dave, what would you say?

Dave: I want to break down what Jerry said about links being important. I certainly agree with that.

But I think in the broader sense, we need to look at linking from two areas. The first one is link popularity, which is just the raw number of links you have. And I do think that can be important in context.

The second, more important function of linking, is link reputation. It's basically the text in the anchor text, and the words to the left or the right of it. So, the context of what the link says, and where the link is, are two very important things to consider.

My third tip is to remember that SEO in and of itself, is always done in a context. You are competing against other pages in the SERPs (search engine results pages). So you also need to look at things like the domain age of your competition.

If you end up seeing that - for a given search term - you are competing against websites that have been around for seven to 10 years, you may want to think twice about entering that market. They may have a lot of incoming links to the overall site, plus a lot of incoming links to the actual page itself.

If that's the case, you'll need to do some competitive analysis to look at the potential rankability, or your likelihood of ranking. You need to determine if you can get into the top five, or give up and move on to another keyword phrase.

So my three would be link reputation, link popularity, and then the domain type factors associated with your competition.

Michael: Excellent stuff. Yes I agree with the links being important.

Usually what I do is try to break them down. For example, back links from quality pages, so that would be link quality or PageRank, as far as Google is concerned.

There are back links from relevant or themed pages, so the links carry more weight when they are in context. And then there is the sheer quantity of links, which is also known as the link popularity.

Part of the Google algo from the very beginning is something called "hubs and authorities." Hubs have many links and authorities have few links. Decide which one you want to be.

Usually a hub will lead to an authority, which leads to another hub. So for example, a hub might be a directory page, which leads to an article style page that's hosted on your site. The authority answers a question and usually cites a hub for more links and info.

I agree with the importance of link reputation. It's that blue clickable hypertext stuff. It builds a reputation, or keyword phrase, for whatever you link it to.

And then the actual on-page factors or that Jerry talked about, the actual topic of your page, which is absolutely critical. What's really important in all this, is that the reputation - the incoming links - match what the target page is about.

I agree with links in context, meaning that the words surrounding the links are important. But I'd also add that links in the center of the page carry more weight, and they' re not likely to be filtered out, or shingled off (as Yahoo calls it) as part of the site template.

I also agree with competing against competition. You're not competing against Google. Every keyword phrase is a different playing field, where you compete against other pages for the same keyword phrase.

Jerry mentioned keywords in page titles, keywords in headline tags, keywords in bold and throughout the body in naturally occurring language. All very important.

Your layout should resemble a newspaper. It needs headlines and subheads to guide the readers and the search engines to the important data.

There is also keyword proximity. Sometimes the keywords are farther apart and other times the keywords are adjacent to one another. And that just happens in naturally in language.

As for themes, yes, search engines like it when you link from a page that's relevant to another page, if it's on the same topic or theme.

Themes are also good for the human visitor, because they can follow that scent of information from top level generic keywords, into long tail specifics, where they can find the information they need to make a purchase decision.

Ginette's got some really good points. Especially the one about clean fast-loading code. I know for a fact that it can prevent spider resets.

For example, if your site is in the process of being spidered and the crawler runs into some rough code, it can reset and go somewhere else, leaving your site unspidered. So be sure to use CSS and HTML validation.

You'll want to make sure your graphics are uncorrupted ( which can happen with age), and that you have cross browser compatibility. Plus you'll want to avoid long session IDs like more than five numbers, or having question marks in the URL if you can.

Dave mentioned the domain age, which is great. I would also suggest checking your domain history on the Wayback Machine or something like that, if you're considering buying a new domain name.

The domain may have been used in the past and got banned at some point. So if you can't seem to get any traction in Google, log into your Google webmaster tools and submit a re-inclusion request. That might remove the penalty on the domain.

And that is about everything that I can think of. What do you think Jerry, did we miss anything?

Jerry: No, I think we covered it really well. The only thing that came to my mind are some add-ons that we discussed in previous podcasts. We learned how the allinanchor, allintitle, and allintext searches in Google show exactly how pages get ranked in your market.

Sorry... but that's another show. I had to cut it off there.

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Michael Campbell is reopening his private site, the Dynamic Media Vault next week. Come loaded with your marketing questions and be prepared to get custom answers, the moment you need them. Want to become part of the club? Come on over. Click here.