The Internet is a relatively new phenomenon that is in constant growth and change. It seems that every second day there is a new announcement by Google about technology advancement and development. (Check out our Article about Google Instant).   Because of the constant growth Google’s method of determining website rankings evolves as the shape of the Internet changes.

While there are possibly hundreds of factors that Google will take into account in its algorithm, I will outline ten of the most important factors of what Google's is looking for when deciding its algorithm.

1. Using Keywords in Title Meta Tags – While this may seem obvious to most people with an understanding of SEO, it still remains a powerful factor in determining your website ranking.

 

2. The Global Link Popularity of your Website – This is determined by both the amount and quality of links that your website receives. The quality refers to websites that carry authority from search engines.

 

3. The Anchor Text of Inbound Links – The anchor text is the words that you use to link from. If the anchor text contains Keywords relevant to the link page, this will carry a stronger weight with search engines.

 

4. Website Page Load Speed – If your website is very slow to load this can negatively affect your websites performance in search engines. You can reduce the load speed by having less graphics and smaller images sizes.

 

5. The Age of a Website - Websites that have a clean track record with Google and have been “live” for a number of years develop trust and authority with Google.

 

6. The Popularity of a Website’s Page Due to Internal Links -This is determined by the number and importance of internal links pointing to a target page

 

7. Keyword Density in Body Text - Your body text should contain Keywords relevant to the page.There should not be an over abundance of Keywords in one area of your text.

 

8. Speed of Getting Links - Once of the reasons I don’t recommend using any of the mass submission directory websites is that if Google see hundreds of links generated to your website overnight, it can be seen as suspicious.

 

9. Links from Top Google Page Rank Websites – This is still a huge deciding factor. Links from a website with a Google page rank of 8, 9 or 10 are very valuable.

 

10. Clean History – No Black Hat SEO - There are two points to be made here. The first is that your website will be penalised if you use black hat SEO techniques such as having extra text on your webpage the same colour as the background. You will be penalised for this. The second point is that you should have a clean web history. This means that your domain name should avoid errors such as 404 Not Found Errors.

These are just some of the factors that Google takes into account when determining its algorithm. Over time the importance of each point will change as the complexity of the web grows.