Ranking in the SERPs - Part 2 - Influential Factors

So I’ve already given you a bit of background information on my experience with ranking in the SERPs and I’ve also discussed how to decide which keywords to target in the SERPs. Now it’s time to go over some of the factors which determine your rank.

What Factors Influence SERPs Rankings?
As I briefly discussed in my teeter-totter post, there are a number of different factors that play into your SERPs ranking. I’m going to outline what I feel to be some of the more important ones while providing some helpful tips on how to maximize the factors effect.

Title Tags
This one should be obvious to most people, but even if it isn’t, don’t worry, you can fix it. It’s easy to implement and is one of the more important factors in SEO. Placing your targeted keyword in the title tags () of your webpage is one of the most powerful HTML edits you can make, but be careful it does have its caveats.

In the case of blogs, be sure that the title for every page isn’t exactly the same or you may run into duplicate content type issues. There are a number of good SEO plugins for WordPress (my platform of choice) which can help perfect your title tags. It’s a relatively simple edit by hand, if you decide to go that route, contact me if you need help.

Anchor Text on Inbound Links
John Chow has made famous the effect of the anchor text of inbound links with his review me program where he generated hundreds of inbound links with the text ‘Make Money Online’ As a result he made it to the first result for the term (only to be banned by Google later)

By using your keyword as the anchor text for your inbound links not only helps to increase your SERPs ranking, but also lets potential clickers of the link know the general topic of the page. What I mean by anchor text is the text that is part of your link. For example: Internet Entrepreneur The link there has my keyword as the anchor text and links to my site. One of my goals is to have more and more people link to my site using that text, in order to increase my ranking; simple enough.

Relevance of Linking Sites
This part goes hand-in-hand with the anchor text I just described above. It’s important that the sites linking to you are related to not only the keyword you’ve chosen, but also the content on your site. Not only does this help your SERPs ranking, but it also increases the likelihood of someone clicking on your link.

Relevant Quality External Links
Believe it or not, linking to other sites can actually benefit your SERPs ranking. By linking to other sites that are high quality and topically relevant, you can create the idea that they are all related which benefits your ranking. Not only do you increase your ranking, but you also share a little link love….what could be better? Remember what goes around comes around, chance are you will get a linkback.

Well, there you have it, 4 important factors that can help or hurt your SERPs ranking depending on how you utilize them. Now it’s your turn to speak! Do you want me to outline additional factors for my next post or move on and discuss the different ways to use these techniques to your benefit?

Good Luck!

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