Search Engine Ranking Factors

Going about my daily surfing around the blogosphere, one of the must stops is always Darren’s Problogger blog. It’s one of the more essential blogs of learning how to blog effectively and gain revenue along with knowledge.

I might have missed this article back on September 30th and I’m glad I found it before it disappeared into the archives. As Darren mentioned in his post HERE, Steve Rubel recently posted an article he found regarding Search Engine Ranking Factors from SEOMoz.

Though it’s a really long read, it would benefit anyone who wants to waste no time to get down and dirty with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) information.

The article measured factors by its level of importance right down to its different categories like:

• In-Document Factors Affecting Ranking
• Site Factors Affecting the Value of Hosted Documents
• Factors Affecting the Value of a Link
• URL, Technical, Hosting & Server Side Factors
• Detrimental Ranking Factors

As you can see, the contents that it will be touching is very in-depth and needs quite a clear mind to digest everything that will be presented to you later. I’ve personally found it very handy though I’ve only read half of it, leaving the other half for another day.

Based on the level of importance of affecting factors, I’ve learned that paragraph headings aren’t entirely beneficial unless it is connecting with the theme of your entry. In the chart, I’ve also picked up that H1 or Heading 1 styling isn’t necessarily the most important thing to have nowadays. It was described as “over-optimization” since everyone implements it with a bold.

This chart even speaks about hyphens in domains and how does it affect your ranking! In that section, I also learnt sitemaps aren’t all that important in achieving a better ranking in search engines.

Now this is something everyone should be learning about. The accessibility of a document is rated as one of the most important in URL, Technical, Hosting & Server Side Factors. The accessibility view of this doesn’t mean preparing your blog or website for screen readers but the errors like 404 – File Not Found or server mishaps.

There’s a ton of stuff to learn at the end too about the negative factors influencing your search engine ranking. Here’s one for the many people reading this.

Duplicate Content
Prevalent on the web as a source of lower rankings, duplicating a large portion of a web site or page’s content onto another page/site can be harmful to one or both sources. Whether this duplication is in violation of intent or copyright has little to do with how search engines evaluate and list duplicate content.

There’s too much to summarize from the Search Engine Ranking Factors chart. Just believe me that it’s a damn good reference to bookmark and use as a checklist regarding factors of search engine rankings.