The 5 SEO Secrets You Need To Know To Rank High In Google

A Google search has become the most important way to find information whether that be for work, play and even finding shopping bargains online. Optimizing your website for search engines is popularly known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization and has become absolutely vital as an integral part of your marketing in the never ending quest to be found online and high in a Google search.

This was highlighted in a rather quirky and fun way recently when I caught up with some friends and in the course of the conversations that were happening across and around the table, I asked a question that no one was able to answer, so one of  the group said “Hang on, let me ask Lord Internet” so she subsequently pulled out her iPhone and “Googled” the answer.

I remember years ago before search engines came to light before the mid 1990’s that if you wanted to find information and do research it was off to the local or university library to find what you were looking for. Scanning the key card indexes and then walking up and down the bookshelves was integral to study and consumed so much time and energy.

Generation “I” (those that have grown up knowing nothing but the “Internet”) take the Web for granted just like eating and breathing and know nothing about how difficult and time consuming it was to track down important and relevant articles and books that you needed to write those essays.

Early search engines like Altavista in 1995 provided search results that opened up the world to finding information with speed and quantity that was frankly amazing. The issue was that the results that were served up in the early days of search were not often relevant and sorting out the information you wanted from the enormous amount of data was very time  consuming with the relevant websites and information not often at the start of the search but buried at page twenty.

So what are 5 Key factors that modern search engines use that you need to know so you can rank high in a Google search.

5 Key Ranking Factors

1.  Key Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links (Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. In modern browsers, it is usually blue and underlined)

2. External Link Popularity (External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on ..eg the source).

Today, the major search engines use many metrics to determine the value of external links. Some of these metrics include:

• The trustworthiness of the linking domain.
• The popularity of the linking page.
• The relevancy of the content between the source page and the target page.
• The anchor text used in the link.
• The amount of links to the same page on the source page.
• The amount of domains that link to the target page.
• The amount of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page.
• The ownership relationship between the source and target domains.

Note: In addition to these metrics, external links are important for two main reasons:

• Popularity
• Relevancy

3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains)

Explanation: Domain names are the human readable Internet addresses of websites. Root domains, which are identified by their domain names, have extensions such as .com, .org, .net, etc. (Ex. http://www.example.com) Subdomains are a lower level component a root domain and precede the domain name. (Example. http://subdomain.domain.com)

A “Root” domain is the top level hierarchy of a domain. Root domains are purchased from registrars. The following are examples of root domains:

• *.example.com
• *.seomoz.org
• *.blogspot.com

A “Subdomain” is a “third level” domain name that is part of a larger, top level domain. For example, “blog.example.com” and “english.example.com” are both subdomains of the “.example.com” root domain. Subdomains are free to create under any root domain that a webmaster controls.

The two most common subdomain choices are: http://www.example.com (www is the subdomain) and http://example.com (has no subdomain)

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

(A title tag is the main text that describes an online document. It is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content) and appears in three key places: Browser, Search Results Page and External Websites.

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)

Explanation: mozTrust quantifies the trustworthiness of a web page relative to all of the other web pages on the web. It is based off of an algorithm developed by Yahoo! search engineers that is likely similar to the trust algorithms used by Google and Bing search engineers. Just as links express global link popularity, they also express information about the trustworthiness of URLs. Receiving links from sources which have inherent trust, such as the homepages of major university websites or certain governmental web pages, is a strong trust endorsement. By measuring the occurrence and frequency of these endorsements, mozTrust can quantify trust on the web.

Note: These 5 Key Ranking Factors are Courtesy of  Seomoz.org click on the hyperlinks in each of the 5 points to get a more in depth explanation

Google and other search engine’s are constantly fine tuning the importance of different key factors that make search relevant so when you are wanting to to rank high on a search you need to keep up to date onb the trends in online search.

So how is your website optimised for these 5 key ranking factors?

Tagged as: Anchor Text, Diversity, Driving Traffic, External Links, Getting Found Online, Google, Optimize, Search Engines, Search Engine Optimization, Secrets, SEO, Title Tag, Trustworthiness