As a search marketer I listen to many SEO podcasts and read many articles about SEO and organic rankings and whats “HOT” and whats “NOT” or quick ways to get ranked well. I say the hell with all that uncertainty and fluctuation. If you design a search engine friendly site that follows all the basics of SEO your organic rankings will come. This is the foundation of SEO Web Design.

Top 5 Positive Ranking Factors:

1. Keyword Use In Title Tag
“In my opinion the most important factor for getting great search engine rankings”, Said Bill Ross of Rank Better SEO. The title tag is the heading that the search engines use to first determine if a page is relevant to what your searching for. Correctly engineering that tag to represent the page content is crucial to getting a good SEO foundation.
2. Meta Data and Description Tag
The Meta data and Description Tag is used to give more relevance to the page, although the search engines will read down the pageand insert a description based on the keywords searched for if none are in the description tag.
3. Anchor Text Of Incoming Links
This goes back to link engineering and how important it is. Please read Link Engineering
4. Link Popularity Within The Site
5. Age Of The Site

Top 5 Negative Ranking Factors:

1. Server Is Often Inaccessible To Googlebot
2. Content Which Is Very Similar Or Duplicate to Existing Content On The Web
3. Spider Can’t Get Into The Site To Crawl The Pages
This should probably be #1 since if it cant get in, it can’t index and cache the pages. This could be causeed by a spider trap that was caused with a bad design or programming idea.
4. Participation In Link Schemes (link farms) or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Meta Tags On More Pages

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