Lately I have had my hands into so many things that when someone recently asked me why their website did not rank as well for a set of keywords as two competitors, my mind drew a blank.
That's when I decided to consult Danny Sullivan's (who I'll probably shake hands with next week at SES NY) recent post on Ranking The SEO Ranking Factors. I used the first part of the SEOmoz's Ranking Factors Version 2 Released and it soon became clear to me why the competitors were ranking ahead of my client.
Here are the Factors that a group of experts agreed were the most helpful to SEO:
Top 10 Positive Factors
And here's the factors that can hurt a site the most in rankings:
Top 5 Negative Factors
The following factors are up in the air as to their influence on a site's rankings:
Most Controversial Factors
- Manual Authority/Weight Given to…
- Relevance of Site's Primary Subj…
- Participation in Link Schemes or…
- Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Man…
- Global Link Popularity of Linkin…
- Quality of the Document Content …
- Domain Extension of Linking Site…
- Server is Often Inaccessible to …
- External Links to Low Quality/Sp…
- TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov,…
And this is what I did with part of that information. What I'd like SEOMoz to do - or someone to do - is create a tool that will automate the collection of every one of these factors and for two or more sites (so they can be compared across sites) and use SEOMoz's ranking weights to come up with an overall score for each site being compare, and or each section of a site being compared, etc.
Just making myself go though the list forced me to focus again - on SEO, and I could see what I needed to say.
One observation I made is that sites are sometimes built solely for SEO, from the ground up - including the structure of how pages are arranged, what they're named, the copy on the pages, the links going to the pages, etc. Sites built that way are going to do better in Search Engines than a site that is about a particular Brand or Experience and uses expressions with a more narrow meaning.
For example, the competitors above used the term "honeymoon in Belize" while my client didn't, they just put down "honeymoon" - but the fact is ….. if your keyword is "honeymoon" your got a zillion sites to fight to the top while Belize honeymoon only had about 1 million sites to fight.
It just seems to me that unless you really plan to build a site for SEO, what your going to end up with is something that you have to do changes on constantly, tweaking, and in the end, I'm not sure weather it's worth it.
But at least, with the Ranking Factors for SEO you can go though the list of factors for yourself and get quite far with optimizing your site and understanding your competition and what they're doing for SEO.
