SEO Factors

*Content
*Meta Tags
*Keyword Tags
*Links - incoming and outgoing

1. Content

*Subject Focus - If your website is only about chocolate chip cookies, you likely will have a good chance of being ranked higher when a user searches for chococlate chip cookies because most of your content will all be related in some fashion to chocolate chip cookies.

*Unqiue Content - People want to get unique perspectives and learn from various sources - all with different opinions. it's important to try and generate fresh and new content. It will help you establish loyalty with your visitors.

2. Tags

*Title Tags - a title tag describes the content for a given page. A title tag should contain the keywords for the given page. You should strive to keep title tags to ten words or less.
*Meta Tags
oDescription - approxiately 200 characters (be careful - 200 characters NOT words).
oKeywords - This should be approxiately 30 words and be the words you think best represent the content on the page as well as the terms that search engine users may search on.

3. Keywords

*Aggregate Keyword Density - be careful not to overuse keywords in the body text of your pages. The percentage of keywords / total words should typically be 5% - 20%. Note that the percentage varies by topic. We will be posting another article soon on this topic.
*Individual Keyword Density - again, be careful not to overuse each keyword in the body text of your pages. The percentage of each keyword / total words should typically be 1% - 6%. Note that the percentage varies by topic. Again, we will be posting another article soon on this topic.

4. Links

There are two types of links - inbound links and outbound links.

*Inbound Links (aka Incoming Links, Backlinks) - These are links from other websites to your website.
oFrom Trusted Sources - Search engines value inbound links fairly highly because they are hard to fake, especially inbound links from trusted and popular websites. Some examples of highly trusted websites include Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Be careful of link farms though. These could actually hurt your traffic.
o

Anchor Text - visible hyperlinked text on a page. This should be on descriptive and relevant to the link. For example, if you are linking to a link about SEO Optimization Factors, a potential anchor text option would be:
+"You should try to learn more about SEO optimization so you can drive website traffic." In this example, the "SEO optimization" is the anchor text.
oLink Stability - Once again, links farms are bad and generally create turnover in links. By having a stable base of links, it helps to validate that your website isn't just linking to link.
*Outbound Links - These are links from your website to other websites.
oLink Stability - By having a stable base of outgoing links from your website, it can help your ranking. You should avoid linking to link farms because this will hurt your website in search rankings. And, make sure you test your outgoing links to make sure they are still active. Users will get annoyed with clicking a link and having it not work.

5. Trust

A trusted website lets search engines know that the content it is crawling is of high quality. Once again, this is something that is hard to fake. Therefore, websites that are highly trusted such as Yahooor Google are able to simply setup a new page for some keyword and be ranked within a few days. Not sure about you, but I'm not that lucky. It takes a lot of time and investment to build upyour website traffic.