A list of 99 important SEO ranking factors

Everyone who owns a website and wants to generate traffic on it is using SEO. From the top affiliate

networks to a brand new beauty blogger, everyone does a bit of search engine optimization,

voluntarily or not. These factors determine how a search engine like Google will rank your affiliate

site as compared to your competitors.

What is important

Just to understand how complicated search engine optimization really is, here is a list of 99 SEO

ranking factors to be considered when optimizing a site (yes, the top affiliate networks are already

doing these things!). But remember that Google isn’t using only these factors, there are even more!

List of 99 important SEO ranking factors

1. The name of the site;

2. How old is the site;

3. Page load speed;

4. The ranking of the page;

5. How many outbound links are there;

6. How many internal links are there;

7. What’s the quality of the internal links;

8. How many broken links does the site contain;

9. The URL part (it’s recommended to be closer to the homepage);

10. The Whois information;

11. The ranking of the domain;

12. Do the page titles incorporate keywords?

13. What is the placement of the keywords in page titles?

14. The length of meta description and search term usage;

15. Keywords included in the H1;

16. Keywords used in H2, H3, H4;

17. LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) used in content;

18. The length of the content;

19. The tags given to the images (including alt-text and file names);

20. The prominence of the keyword (if it appears in the first 100 words of the text);

21. What’s the quality of the outbound links;

22. URL that contains keywords;

23. Lists and bullets;

24. The page’s age and the site’s age;

25. The whole architecture of the website;

26. Design that’s user-friendly;

27. How often is the site updated;

28. The layout of the sitemap;

29. The location of the server;

30. Breadcrumb navigation

31. Exact match versus synonyms and phrase match for search items;

32. Easy access to the contact information;

33. HTML errors and a chaotic code;

34. Content syndication

35. The multimedia content (including images and videos);

36. Spelling, grammar and style;

37. The frequency of page updates (over time);

38. Canonical tags;

39. The same content (duplicate);

40. Long-tail keywords used;

41. Related terms that are used on site;

42. Country code in a to-level domain;

43. Keywords used in the domain;

44. Webmaster Tools penalties and site health;

45. Selling backlinks (important for the top affiliate networks);

46. Links that have the same C-class IP;

47. Too many backlinks;

48. Affiliate links on your page (important for anyone who is an affiliate marketer and also for

the top affiliate networks);

49. Keyword stuffing in the meta tags;

50. Keyword stuffing in the content;

51. Cloaked links;

52. Pop-ups or anything that is bad for the user experience;

53. Ads placed above the fold;

54. Over-optimization on-site;

55. Over-optimization off-site;

56. Citation listings in relevant directories;

57. Mentions on other sites (news sites);

58. Social media profiles, such as Official Facebook profile and Official Twitter profile;

59. Official LinkedIn page;

60. Branded anchor text in backlinks;

61. The social levels of the site’s signals;

62. “Votes” on sites like Reddit and Stumbleupon (social sharing sites);

63. The authority of the social accounts;

64. Google+ links;

65. Google maps presence;

66. Pins on Pinterest;

67. The rankings and performance on local search;

68. Bounce rate;

69. Exit rate;

70. Repeat traffic;

71. Direct traffic;

72. Google Chrome’s bookmarks;

73. Numbers of comments;

74. Social shares number;

75. How many pages are visited on you site by the users;

76. How much time users spend on your site;

77. Organic click-through rate (CTR) for a given search term;

78. The quality of linking content (important for the top affiliate networks);

79. Sitewide links;

80. Word count of linking content;

81. Number of outbound links on a page linking back to your page;

82. DMOZ listings;

83. Schema microformats and markup;

84. Social signals;

85. Negative link velocity;

86. Relevancy of backlinks;

87. The location of a link on a page (important for the top affiliate networks);

88. The location of a link in content (important for the top affiliate networks);

89. Backlink anchor text;

90. Contextual links vs. directory links;

91. No-follow links;

92. Quality of the guest posts and links in the guest posts;

93. The authority of the referring pages;

94. The number of the inbound links;

95. The quality of the inbound links;

96. The reviews added by the users and industry niched review sites;

97. Usage of Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools;

98. Mobile optimization and responsive web master;

99. Breadcrumb navigation.

Wrapping things up

It’s good to know that Google doesn’t share the complete list of ranking factors it uses! We can only

spend a lot of time researching and speculating what works best and what could be changing soon so

you can have a well-indexed site and work with the top affiliate networks. To know more about

Google’s rankings, read this article (Google: high-quality sites explained).