Part 2: Things Search Engines Look For in brief

~ Link Popularity (Check Page Rank in Google’s case).
~ How may other web pages around the Internet point to your web site?
~ Are these pages related to each other?
~ Are they considered valuable resources?
~ Anchor Text of inbound links
~ Does the link to your web site have relevant keywords in it?
~ Even if it is not directly relevant, a web page that is important that links to your site will still help your web site.
~ Presence on marked authority pages. (DMOZ)
~ Url quotation – i.e. when a page mentions the site by url but doesn’t link to it. This commonly occurs in news articles that mention web sites. While it doesn’t count as a link, it does count as a reference.
 Number of links on pages linking to this page. If the link to your web site is the only one from a page, it’s viewed as being more valuable than being one link among 100.
~ Freshness of links on pages linking to your web site. While the engines will count all links, a link from a web site that has not been updated in a year or two will be less valuable than from one that is updated daily. It indicates activity / interest levels.
~ Page Last Modified (Freshness) – just like the last point a page that is updated frequently is favored.
~ Reciprocal Links- Search engines like to see a closed loop – that a referring site as also used as a reference. So when you are giving away a link, ask for one back. It will help both websites.
~ Keyword frequency across all pages. Does the content really talk to the subject which the page and the web site is supposed to be about?
~ Keywords in the url: Using keywords in the url does have an effect for the search engine algorithms.
~ You can use keywords in the filename. For example if the page is about ford parts, then call it “http://www.sitename.com/car-parts.html” use dashes “-” and not underscores “_” to separate words in filenames.
~ Response Time – If your site is fast, it’s favored.
~ Server Downtime – If the search engine robot comes by and frequently can’t connect sometimes, they penalize your site.
~ Page Size – The engines tend to weigh content at the start of a document more than content further down. If a page is long, look at breaking it into sections. If a page is over 50k, then it’s too long.