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.

Bookmark to:

A couple days ago I wrote about the most important SEO ranking factor according to 37 search experts. Today I’ll cover the ranking factors that placed 2nd and 3rd.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site – The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity)

This should come as no surprise to SEOs. Anchor text and link popularity have been important for a while now. So, instead of trying to prove to you how important they are, I’ll talk about common mistakes regarding these two factors.

The thing I’ve been seeing with anchor text is webmasters using the same text without varying it. This looks unnatural to Google, so you risk being penalized. John Chow, a popular blogger, got a top 10 ranking for make money online by doing a reciprocal link exchange with his readers. However, he got caught by Google and they dropped him off the front page of the SERPs.

Here’s the lesson to learn: don’t link with just one anchor text. For example, if you’re trying to rank for hawaii travel, don’t only use that text. Use other texts like

great hawaii travel
travel to hawaii
hawaii vacation
hawaii destination
tropical paradise

Also, to really look more natural and go under Google’s radar, add other types of links like image links and non-keyword anchor text links like click here, link, and http://yoursite.com.

With link popularity, the thing to remember is the importance of deep links, or links to internal pages, and quality links.  It looks spammy if most of your links point to your home page.  It looks more natural if you have links to your subdomains, folders, and internal pages.  And make sure you have great content, because that’s the best way to get links from quality sites.

Bookmark to:

The Smart PageRank community is great. Luca, one of our Smart PageRank users, recently submitted 2 awesome Firefox plugins based on Smart PageRank and Backlinks Analyzer.

These plugins are saving me a lot of time because you can use Smart PageRank or Banklinks Analyzer right on the Firefox browser.  You just enter the URL in the Firefox search box on the top right.

No more typing the Smart PageRank URL or searching through your bookmarks.  It’s right there on your browser.

Check out these screenshots.

Thanks, Luca. Awesome job.

Get the plugins!

Bookmark to:

Let’s face it. SEO can take a lot of tedious work before you see results. This is especially true if you’re starting a new site on a fresh domain. Many articles have been written about the Google sandbox. Supposedly, this is the place where new sites go before they can start ranking for more competitive terms. Basically, this means your new site won’t have a lot of organic search traffic for awhile – a couple months even. That’s a lot of time to lose when you could be getting search traffic and making profit.

So, what can you do to combat the sandbox effect? Simple, buy an old domain. If you don’t have the cash, this should be one thing you should be saving up for.

Older sites have a huge advantage over newer sites. In fact, in a survey done by 37 SEO experts, the 4th most important SEO ranking factor was the age of a site. To be more specific, this factor referred “not [to] the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines.”

By buying an older site, think of all the time you would be saving. Time building links, time producing content, time looking for a domain name. At first, when I first learned about Google using age as a huge search ranking factor, I thought it was unfair. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me. Just like new employees have to prove themselves in a company, new sites need to prove themselves to have a spot in the SERPs.

You can use this to your advantage by “hiring” (buying) that older, well-proven employee (site). And what’s great about buying sites is there are many great deals out there. You just have to do proper research to make sure you’re buying a quality site.

Here are two things you should do before purchasing a site.

* Use our PageRank tool to see if the PageRank is not fake.

* Use our backlink checker to examine the backlinks.  Does the site have a lot of backlinks?  Are the backlinks coming from quality, high PR sites?  Also, go to the sites giving the backlinks and check to see if the backlinks are still there.

Further resources:

Aged Domains: What you need to Know
Great article. It inspired me to write this blog entry.

Terrible Web Presence Creates Opportunities
This article is more about flipping sites, but there’s also good information about buying them.

Bookmark to: