Search engine ranking factors 'have remained consistent'

15:00 15th June 2009

The factors that contribute to the ranking of a site on search engines such as Google have remained fairly similar over the past four years, it has been claimed.

According to Mike McDonald, ebusiness expert for WebProNews.com, the fundamentals were broadly the same in 2005 as they are now.

He explained that it is still crucial to have good title tags and that this means important terms need to be placed as early as possible.

The anchor text also remains an important consideration for search engine optimisation (SEO), both for inbound links and for internal linking.

Firms looking to improve their SEO campaigns should also try to ensure that as many as possible of the domains linking to a website are unique because this is important when determining rankings.

Keyword density was described as another important factor to consider when optimising a site for SEO purposes.

Mr McDonald asserted that it was not necessarily desirable to cram as many keywords in as possible as this can cause the quality of the content to suffer.

This comes after Liam Bailey of Write About Property advised those producing copy for SEO to try to create natural articles rather than focussing on the inclusion of keywords.