Search Engine Ranking Factors by SEOmoz Members

[alfredopalconit]

We all know the world-famous SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors), and this article is from recommendations and opinions from the world's top SEO experts.

But not everyone were able to share their thoughts on what they think are important.

What do you think are this year's Search Engine Ranking Factors?

[DavidKauzlaric]

Honestly? It's easy for me. I have a swath of clients that I do SEO for and it's simple what we do...

1- Provide the highest quality content available.

2- Develop the highest authoritative and natural links possible.

3- Watch the rankings roll in.

Honestly, that works for me. Of course I do the best practices for on-page optimization, but that is such a small part of it. All my clients and my own sites rank well.

[saibose]

#1. Unique useful on page content

#2. Good interpage linking and natural contextual linking

#3. Social mentions and retweets by influencial people

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[glennfriesen]

The linkscape is complex. Most of the time, the answer is "high quality content and many authoritative links". Other, complex times, it's not.

When is it Not?

I'm competing with two sites that quite simply suck for a relatively competitive keyword phrase. Neither provide useful content. Neither have much content at all (one has 10 pages). Neither have very many links. Both stuff targeted keywords into their pages, and receive high LDA scores. One benefits from a long history of being listed in DMOZ for this targeted keyword (rather than their company name), the other benefits from being part of a sizable parent company and receiving regular links resulting from various real-world resellers of their product. Neither have performed any article marketing, content marketing, or link building over the last year.

How do those two sites compete with mine at all? It's not their content. It's not their authoritative links. (I'm assuming it's a mix of their high LDA, their extremely natural link profiles [with almost no linkrot over 10 years], and their ranking history. Anyway, my point is there are exclusions to the rule about content and links.)