Factors Influencing Search Engine Rankings

SEOmoz has a comprehensive list of factors that influence your search engine rankings on the major search engines – Yahoo!, MSN, Google and AskJeeves. They invited some of the big names – Danny Sullivan, Ammon Johns and Scottie Claiborne – in the search engine world to vote on the major factors and an average rank was given to each. Here are the top ten:

1. Title Tag – 4.57
2. Anchor Text of Links – 4.46
3. Keyword Use in Document Text – 4.38
4. Accessibility of Document – 4.3
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages – 4.15
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site – 4.00
7. External Links to Linking Pages – 3.92
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – 3.77
9. Global Link Popularity of Site – 3.69
10. Keyword Spamming – 3.69

For the complete report, head off to the SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors page (**Update: no longer around).