SEO Advanced Factors
What
other factors affect rankings besides back links?
Where
you’re getting your links, the quality of these links, the relevancy of these
links, how many links you have and what keywords you’re using as the anchor
text all affect your rankings. But there are other factors that affect your
ranking, including but not limited to:
- On
page optimization factors – this is how well you’ve optimized
your tags, content, formatting, keyword proximity, site map, and links on
your web page. This also includes whether you use your keywords at the top
of your page and in your “alt” tags (both good things).
- Having
a lot outgoing or reciprocal links pointing to “bad” sites (like link
farms) – can negatively impact rankings.
- Whether
you have unique content (which the SE’s like).
- How
frequently you update your site. Faster isn't necessarily better. Check
what ranks well for your niche and aim to match it.
- Whether
your domain includes your primary keywords.
- Your
domain’s age, reputation, IP address and whether it’s a top level domain
(e.g., a .com is better than a .info although probably not by much).
- Shady
practices such as keyword stuffing or using text that’s the same color as
the background can negatively affect your rankings. Only an issue if your
site gets manually inspected and you don't have a legitimate reason for
it.
- Showing
one page to the search engines and other page to visitors negatively
affects your rankings. (Cloaking and doorway pages.)
- Frames
negatively affect your rankings.
- Using
content that the search engines can’t read, like audios, flash, videos,
graphics (without alt tags), etc.
- Whether
you have a robots.txt file that tells the search engine bots to stop
crawling or indexing your site.
How quickly will I
see results?
If you target long tail keywords you can see results pretty quickly but always
remember SEO
is a long term strategy not a set and forget thing.
If you’re after more competitive keywords prepare to commit to it for at least
three months of consistent effort.Should I Rank my own content or articles on
other sites?
Yes – but let’s qualify that.
Because you can’t control what third-party sites do, you should focus the vast majority of your efforts on ranking content on your own sites.
However, you can leverage high-ranking third-party sites by posting SEO’ed content on them and then you including a link back to your own site. Not only do you get the SEO benefits of the backlinks, you’ll also get indirect search engine traffic from people clicking through to your main site.
Because you can’t control what third-party sites do, you should focus the vast majority of your efforts on ranking content on your own sites.
However, you can leverage high-ranking third-party sites by posting SEO’ed content on them and then you including a link back to your own site. Not only do you get the SEO benefits of the backlinks, you’ll also get indirect search engine traffic from people clicking through to your main site.
Does domain age help?
Yes – search engines view an older domain as more trustworthy, which means older domains may have a slight advantage. But this is only true if the older domain has a good reputation (e.g., it hasn’t been blacklisted, penalized or banned from the search engines).
Yes – search engines view an older domain as more trustworthy, which means older domains may have a slight advantage. But this is only true if the older domain has a good reputation (e.g., it hasn’t been blacklisted, penalized or banned from the search engines).
What is the
"freshness" factor?
Search engines such
as Google prefer “fresh” (newly updated) web pages and content over stale
content. That’s why when you first add content to your site – such as a new
blog post – this page may sit high in the rankings for a while. Eventually it
may sink to a more realistic ranking.
It’s this “freshness
factor” that allows your pages to get those higher rankings, even if the
ranking is temporary. Thus updating your pages frequently can help push them to
the top of the rankings.
This is one of the primary reasons why you hear people talking about how
“Google loves blogs”. Google doesn’t love blogs, Google loves regularly updated
sites.
What is the
"Google Dance"?
When “stuff” changes the SERPs fluctuate, sometimes wildly. One day your site
could be number 1 and the next nowhere to be seen. One of the main contributing
factors to that is how Google sees your backlinks (which you’re consistently
building, right?).
Don’t obsess over it, just keep building and you’ll be fine.
