Search Engine Positive Ranking Factors

We have created a Positive Ranking Factor's Worksheet for your use. Check your website pages for the following ranking factors:

1. Title Tag

Denoted by the title tag in HTML. This tag always shows at the top of a browser window and often appears in the SERPs as the title of the web page.

2. Keyword Use in Document

The use of keywords appearing in the document text.

3. Links to Document Form Site-Internal Pages

A specific page's importance in a site's overall architecture can be measured by the importance and depth of the other pages on the site that refer to the page in question. An internally well-linked to document is generally considered more important than an obscured or buried page.

4. Uniqueness of Document

A document's unique elements are what is generally looked at by the search engines and if the unique elements of a document (the body text or content) is an exact copy of another document (whether that document is on your site or on another), that page's value will often be deeply discounted or even removed from the listings.

5. Related Term Use in Document Text

Along with the actual targeted term/phrase, search engines examine all of the text in a document to determine if the other terms used are related and whether they give the subject of the document a specific slant as related to the primary subject.

6. External Links in Document

The sites and pages linked to from a document. These may positively or negatively influence rankings based on the quality of the links, their relationship to the linking document and any existing relationships between the sites hosting the documents.

7. Age of Document

Nearly every document has an inception date calculated by a search engine as the first time the spider noticed the page or a link to the page. Older documents may be considered more authoritative, trusted and valuable than new documents, particularly if they have continued to build links over a long period of time. New documents may be considered more timely or relevant to time-sensitive queries.

8. Citation Links or Sources

Citations (as footnotes or endnotes in a research paper) could be links to additional info or mentions of publications, documents or papers from which information was drawn.