“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 There’s a lot of conflicting information out there, much of it highly speculative or woefully out-of-date.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:

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SEO guru Jill Whalen has answered  a selection of newbie questions in a recent edition of her excellent newsletter.

Ever wondered how many links you need to get to #1 in Google? Or, what factors affect my Google ranking? Or, how can I write my website content to get better rankings?

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