I’ve been writing about the top 10 most important search engine ranking factors according to over 30 search experts. Here are my previous posts on this subject:

The Most Important Search Engine Ranking Factor
2nd And 3rd Most Important SEO Ranking Factors

Also, I’ve written about the 4th most important factor, Age Of Site, in this blog post: SEO Shortcut: Buy An Old Domain.

So, that brings us to the 5th and 6th factors.

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword

Internal linking is something that can be easily overlooked. But it’s a good idea to keep track your internal links because unlike external links it’s something you can control.

Test the profitability of your pages so that you’ll know which pages should receive more links. The pages that convert well should also have the high PR internal links.

Ask yourself, “Which internal pages is my home page linking to?” The home page usually has higher PR than the internal pages, so it’s a good idea to have your home page link to your most important and profitable pages.

And don’t forget to use the proper anchor text for your internal links. This is a common but costly mistake for many webmasters.

If you have a blog, it can be easy to forget to link to your internal pages. This can be disastrous for your link equity especially if you link out a lot. If you’re on the Wordpress blogging platform, use the Related Posts plugin to immediately improve your internal linking.

I believe as Google’s algorithm gets better the 6th factor, Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site, will become more important. Google is always aiming to become more relevant and giving more weight to topical links is one way to increase relevancy. This is what Caveman, one of the search experts, wrote:

We seem to have moved from analysis of simply anchor text, to including surrounding text and probably even page theme.

How do you know what Google considers as topical links? One simple way is to do a search for your target keyword phrase. Then, try to get links from the sites in the top 50 of the SERPs of your keyword phrase. Also, you can use our backlink checker on a competing site. Then, aim to get the same high PR links that your competitor has.

One Comment to "4th, 5th, and 6th Most Important SEO Ranking Factors"

  • SEO Backlinks » SEO Backlinks July 6, 2007 11:15 pm said: On 07/06/2007 at 8:18 pm

    [...] 4th, 5th, and 6th Most Important SEO Ranking Factors Then, try to get links from the sites in the top 50 of the SERPs of your keyword phrase. Also, you can use our backlink checker on a competing site. Then, aim to get the same high PR links that your competitor has. [...]

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