“Some guy told me I need to put a Google search box on my site and have a 5% keyword density on each page if I want to get on the first page of Google…”
Really? You’ve got to be very careful whose advice you trust when it comes to SEO. There’s a lot of conflicting information out there, much of it highly speculative or woefully out-of-date.
(BTW, my two most trusted and useful sources of SEO information are Dan Thies and Jill Whalen.)
The only people who really know how Google works are the folks at Google, and they ain’t telling.
But the next best source of infomation is SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors survey. Every couple of years SEOmoz surveys the world’s top SEO experts to gauge their opinions on what factors are most important in achieving top Google rankings.
So without further ado, here are the Top 5 Ranking Factors from the 2009 survey:
- Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links – 73% very high importance
- External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links) – 71% very high importance
- Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains) – 67% very high importance
- Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag – 66% very high importance
- Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.) – 66% very high importance
There are two important points to note:
- Links are the most important piece of the SEO puzzle (in case you didn’t know already).
- On-page factors such as keyword usage, title tags, meta descriptsions, etc., while essential, will only take you so far.
Charles Cuninghame – Freelance Website Copywriter
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