Latest Search Engine Ranking Factors

TopRank discovered a new study listing some of the top Search Engine Ranking Factors.

Here they are:

Keywords in the title tag

Targeted keywords in the body tag

Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don’t seem to have an effect.

Using keywords in bold or strong tags – slight effect

Keywords in image file names

Keywords in image alt attributes

Keyword in the domain name – although, using domain names as link text may explain this

Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.)

PageRank

Inbound links – The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

What do I think of this study?

Let, let me share this with you.  Of the last 10 posts that I tried to optimize, ALL of them show up on the first page of Google for the keyword phrase that I was targeting.  So, I must be doing something right and here are the factors that I pay attention to:

• Keyword phrase in title
• Keyword phrase in meta description (will increase clicks from Google)
• Keyword phrase in H1 and H2
• Keyword phrase in H3-H6 (but not all H1-H6)
• Keyword phrase in first and last paragraph
• Optimzied URL including keyword phrase

So, for what its worth, that is the secret sauce behind the optimized blog posts that we write.  Plus, most importantly, have original well written content that will actually help your readers once you rank on the first page.