The List of Important Ranking Factors

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

The list of the most important search engine optimization factors is very large and continues to grow larger by the day. Well, maybe not growing too much larger. I mean, sometimes we hear about a new factor, but SEO hasn’t changed too drastically in ten years. Still, it doesn’t stay the same every day either. So what is the most important search engine optimization factor?

Based on my experience and current industry data and trends, here is a short laundry list of important factors (in no particular order):

• Number of inbound links - The trust factor of your website and growth of natural relevant links over time.
• On-page content - Good, user focused quality website content.
• Meta tags – Well crafted and relevant Title tags, etc.
• Page authority of each page – Also known as Google Pagerank (although not as important these days).
• Alt tags – Image tags that help the user experience on each page of a website.
• Anchor text – The anchor text used on all inbound and internal linking to a website.
• Age of a Domain – How old a domain happens to be, this is part of the trust factor or domain/website authority.
• Code to Text Ratio – How much code is contained on the page in relation to the amount of relevant content on each page.
• H1 and H2 tags – Headlines of well written optimized tags

Of course, there are hundreds of other factors that influence search engine positioning in the major search engines as well, some of them in a negative way. But what is the most important factor? Still, today, after over ten years of search engine optimization, quality, original content is the No. 1 factor that influences SEO. Focus on quality, original content and make everything else secondary. Not absent, but secondary.