Blog de Jon Valencia | SEO, Marketing Online, E-Commerce

I inspired myself to write about this list of 10 search engine factors (SEO), that is to say, those what search engines (SE’s here on) consider to make its mathematical calculations and give as result the ranking/position of every website in its listings. Obviously there are confidential data that these corporations are not going to disclose never for free competition and privacy reasons; this besides the fact that they’ve been modifying them (the importance of each factor) because of bad use that users/webmasters did in the course of the last years.

It’s worth mentioning that these factors are under my personal appreciation, which I have experienced and may change in the course of time, this doesn’t mean they are completely true. I am going to subtitle/classify all factors into 2 groups: primary and secondary.

Primary Factors

1. Website Title: it’s no one secret to anybody that SE consider this factor as very important, specially Yahoo and Bing. The title is all content that is into tags of your HTML code, within it should contain your most important keyword. Taking as sample that mine would be “Texas Real Estate”, a title could be..

 <title>Texas Real Estate | Other keywords here </title>

2. Incoming Backlinks: this is the heavyweight factor to Google than the rest of SE’s. Quality more that quantity links from the different websites that “point to” or “link to” your site, is what Google considers most important. What do I mean by quality? For example, a link from New York Times or Washington Post is more important that one from Peter Smith blog; and about quantity? the more links better…

The conditions that a optimum backlink needs to have are:

• Be a “dofollow” link, i.e. that the link doesn’t have the HTML tag rel=”nofollow”
• Have an adequate structure, i.e. the main or secondary keyword contained into that link.

For example, an adequate link for using to my blog (and I’d like to be backlinked), using the keyword “e-commerce blog” would be:

 <a href="http://ovalencia.com/en/">E-commerce Blog</a>

3. Headers: they’re the famous <H1> and <H2> HTML tags, and have as a main function to stick out subtitles or keywords relevant to the paragraph that comes after. It’s not known if the SE’s give more importance to, whether H1 or H2, is a long discussion topic; I guess nobody can asseverate respecting to SEO but approximations about how it does work.
Into these headers is advisable also to include the main keywords of your website, the same that should be before the main content section or paragraph, as follows:

<H1>Texas Real Estate</H1>
<H2>Texas Apartments</H2> or <H2>Texas Houses</H2>

4. Content: first of all, it must be an unique content, i.e. original, not forged or copied/pasted from other sources, like a book, website nor document, since SE’s could deduct points to your website if they find forgery and do not publish that in their web search results, especially Mr. Google. Besides, the same has to be focused on the keywords you have thought beforehand (in this example “Texas Real Estate” and “Texas Houses”), that is to say, you have to develop a writing context around them. Some people say that keywords have to be as high as possible into the content, it may be valid. And as a last point, it should have a minimum of words, be generous here, several lines instead of few words.

5. Sitemaps: used in different formats, like XML (most popular), xHTML and WML (both for cell phones) and others. They consist in a simple file text containing a list of every singular web page of your site, added to a place into your common web content (usually through FTP). e.g. sitemap.xml. They make the SE’s work easier by mapping the entire web, based on the assumption that all your content is into that file. For example, in this website, this is my sitemap. I recommend to read some XML tutorial if you want to implement it, this factor is not mandatory but pretty important. It’s interesting how fast is your website added by SE’s when sitemaps are used, required if you got a new blog.
A well built map besides the right web notifier (ping) and indexation process will be even faster.

6. Some metas: and I don’t say all of them, because Google, at least, has acknowledged that they don’t take into consideration the “meta-keywords” field, usually spammy. But what are they? Metas are HTML fields that help to index websites by providing your important keywords to SE’s; they are located into <HEAD> tags, and are many, but the most important are:

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" [Only informative, about character type]
meta name="keywords"           [Keywords, Google does not care]
meta name="description"        [Description, SE's take care]
meta name="DC.Language"        [Only informative, about language]

And continuing this example, I will declare this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />  [Only informative]
<meta name="keywords" content="texas real estate, texas apartments" />     [Google does not mind]
<meta name="description" content="Website about texas real estate and.." /> [Google does mind]
<meta name="DC.Language" scheme="RFC1766" content="en" />            [Language info]
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en" />                  [Language info]

7. Domain Name: this factor is important to get into the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) fast, specially in Yahoo and Bing, more that in Google. In general words, a good domain name should be choose under the following criteria:

• Contain your goal keywords or be related: if your keywords are “black shoes” and “leather shoes”, ideally is to buy a domain name containing or starting with “shoes”, e.g. www.ShoesTim.com
• Location by country: do you want your website get ranking only locally? (in your country and in your language), you should look for a country domain. That is to say, if you comes from USA, buy a .US, if your are from UK, buy a .CO.UK and so on….If your aim is to get an internationally audience or your country domain prices are too high, it may be good to get a .COM
• Lenght: for SE aims, domain is better containing your most important keywords, be short and not using a hyphen if possible (1 at most).
  I’ll post a complete article about this factor ASAP.

8. Broken links and penalizations: this point is noteworthy, due SE’s consider that a website is less important (or deduct points) when your site links to other that: doesn’t exist (404), permanently down, have a kind of penalization (because many reasons: black hat technics, virus), be a link farm or other similar.

Every SE wants users get the best possible experience when using their applications, this comprise the user search for a keyword, obtain the search results and get a quality information; therefore is important to have a website that comply with all their requirements. Now, you know, check if all your external links work and do not backlink any little known (or unknown) site, because yours may be blacklisted.

This tip might be important from this 2010, as Matt Cutts (Google engineer 100% responsible of web ranking) announced that the “web server time response will be more important for Google in the next future”, let’s see…

9. Internal folders: this point is important if the page you want to rank in SE’s is not the homepage; you have to name folders using your keywords; continuing with the example of Texas, let’s assume the domain you bought is RealEstateHill.com and your kw’s are “Texas Houses” and “Texas Apartments”, the advisable structures your pages should have are:

realestatehill.com/texas/houses.html ó
realestatehill.com/texas-houses.html (according to your taste and language)

realestatehill.com/texas/apartments.php ó
realestatehill.com/texas-apartments.php (in this case, using PHP)

The idea is not repeat keyword (out of the domain name) once at most, if more is found, usually is not valuable by SE’s and it just looks untidy. Thus get additional traffic from people who search for “real estate texas” and “real estate texas apartments”.

10. Language: probably you wonder in which country rank your website better, the answer is: where your goal public is living. Let me give an example close to reality, as webmaster, we’d like our site rank well in all countries who speak the same language (e.g. english: USA, Canada, England, Australia and so on). This factor is quite related to the number 2 (Incoming Backlinks) in the fact that: if you want rank well, you must get backlinks from local websites related to those countries.

Example: got the domain CoolTires.co.uk and I want to rank in Google Ireland with keyword “Car Tires”; well, you need to get backlinks from Irish sites or related to them (especially .IE) pointing to your website using that keyword. And I don’t mean “link exchange”, that method has lost importance for SE’s in the last years, if possible get a “one-way backlink”, that has a greater value that the first.

And, so far the first part (and most important) of Search Engine factors, in the next I’ll indicate the rest of them (secondary) that SE’s consider to make its ranking calculations (according Google there are over 200 factor, but I don’t know all, I just suppose them). I will attach the link below in “Related Posts”.

Thank you for reading and Regards

Jon

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