Introducing SEO Ranking Factors
What will make me top? Or more precisely “What are the factors that determine my position in the natural listings for a specific key phrase and what is their relative importance?”

Wow! Those are the questions that everyone involved in SEO, from clients to agencies, wants and needs to know. So let’s work through some answers.

Unfortunately, the number of people who can definitively answer these questions by concisely explaining the hundreds of factors, and the way they work with one another, is strictly limited to the engineers who work for the search engines.

However, through combining the experience of the authors, the review team and disclosure from the search engines and expert commentators, we have compiled a comprehensive list of the most important factors which determine position in the listings.

What determines ranking position in the natural listings?
The position or ranking in the natural listings for a particular key phrase is dependent on a search engine’s ranking algorithm.

For the search query entered into the search engine, the algorithm uses rules Sommerseo or heuristics to identify the most relevant pages, based on the page’s text content and its context (which can be indicated by links from other pages and sites).

Each search engine has a different set of algorithms created by engineers who strive to produce the best relevance for its users.

However, the ranking of natural listings has evolved as a science over the past ten years, based on an even longer history of document indexing and retrieval history. As with all sciences, there are fundamental principles which apply. So to deliver relevance search engines tend to use common search engine ranking factors.

Enough with the science: get with the ranking factors…

We will soon enough. But before we do here’s a word to the wise: understanding some of the most common ranking factors is straightforward. Keyword: ‘straightforward’.