There are many folks that will ask questions of search marketers. One of the common ones is what affects how a page is ranked. Well a great list was compiled by SEOMoz. SEOMoz created the first and second comprehensive search ranking factors document.
Thanks to HuoMah.com, we have a revised document that is spot on and more concise. Take a look at HuoMah.com.
Here is the list without details on each topic. Keep in mind that these things are not just black and white. Some matter more than others and the relevance of each factor will vary based upon the site.
- PageRank (or relative nodal link valuation)
- Link text (internal and external)
- Link relevance (global and page)
- Also see Temporal, Personalized PageRank and Phrase factors.
- Page TITLE tag
- Meta-description tag
- Document inception/age data
- Link velocity
- Link age
- Viral/Current news (QDF)
- Time of year (niche trends)
- Content update rate
- Domain history
- Inbound links (global)
- Outbound links
- Named entities (products, brand, author)
- Contact information (also important for geographic signals)
- Location of client device
- Location of webpage hosting
- Contact / location information
- Inbound/outbound link geo-factors
- Linguistic indicators (language and nuances)
- Heading (H1-5)
- Bold
- Italic
- Lists
- Font attributes (size, color)
- Related phrase ratios
- Categorization of content (clusters)
- Occurrences (probabilistic)
- Duplication dampening (filters)
- Personalization (phrase based)
- Link analysis (inbound)
- Global site relevance
- Term proximity (for multi-term queries)
- Image tagging (in content segment/related terms)
- Search History
- Web history (pages/sites we visit)
- Query revision (and analysis)
- Search intent (informational, navigational)
- Explicit data (favourites, reader,wiki)
- Interaction with advertising
- Surfing frequency/ time of day
- Personalized PageRank (yahoo and google)
- SERP and document interactions
- Duplicate issues (structural/content)
- Link devaluations (segmentation, link text, recips)
- Poor architecture/coding
- Reviewer penalties
- Redundant meta-data (such as meta-descriptions)
- Canonical / URL issues
- Server reliability (can be de-indexed)
- Phrase based detection
- Cloaking
- Boilerplate
- Domain history
- Query analysis
- Network proxy detection
- Link based (link spam and excessive recips)
- Client type (browser, mobile)
- Toolbars and browser (Google Suggest, web history)
- Application focus (email, instant messenger, RSS etc..)