Here are a few positive factors that influence your ranking:<p>- Exact match keywords are an absolute killer when it comes to ranking<p>- Local beats global if your target is geographic (e.g., mysite.ca will perform better than mysite.com in Canada, particularly if the .ca is hosted in Canada)<p>- Number of backlinks to the specific page<p>- Number of backlinks to the whole domain<p>- Popularity of backlinks<p>- A variety of backlinks. Your backlinks need to look natural to Google. You want a backlink pyramid, so don't have 100 PR5 backlinks, and 10 PR0 ones. The web doesn't work that way, and Google knows it.<p>- For the same reason, have no follow backlinks as well. Whether they carry PR juice or not, it's unnatural for your site not to have a mix of no follow and do follow backlinks.<p>- Backlinks from .edu/.gov sites<p>- An aged domain name<p>- Include the keyword in the url, title tag, description, etc.<p>- Metatags are still important, even if Google doesn't care about them.<p>- Make your site as fast as you can<p>- Have an XML sitemap<p>- PubSubHubbub is excellent to get your site noticed/indexed by Google<p>- The number of indexed pages on your site<p>- How frequently is your site updated (often is better than rarely)<p>- Make your content unique. Duplicate content is not as much of a big deal as they say it is, but you definitely don't want to look like an autoblog in the eyes of Google (particularly in the early days of your site).<p>- A public whois record<p>- A domain registered for more than one year<p>- Get your site indexed in DMOZ and Yahoo Directory
I've done my fair share of research on SEO as well during my startup and I can sum it up in one sentence.<p>Assuming equal on-site optimisations, he with more backlinks wins.
Thanks for the article. I think it will be helpful.<p>Can I ask, either OP or anyone else, what sort of percent of your traffic comes from SEO? I've seen it stated on the web that 70%-80% of traffic comes from searches, but for me, it's more like 5%, with adwords and direct links being the rest.
My own strategy right now is to set up a members' forum as part of my paid service, but to make reading the forum free for all. Hope that it will help with content generation.