Internal ranking factors are things you control directly (as part of your site) that can affect your rank in the SERPs. There are two types of internal ranking factors: on-page ranking factors (things you can do in a particular web page, such as providing appropriate keywords) and on-site ranking factors (things you can do to your website as a whole).
How can you take into consideration hundreds of different ranking factors? You can’t. The key is to home in on 20 or so of the most important known factors—those that have stood the test of time and produced results consistently. Knowing what to optimize can make SEO a lot easier. Instead of listening to Internet hype, website owners should rely on provable facts.
This chapter sets the stage for what is to come in Chapter 13. Its ultimate goal is to take out the guesswork and really focus on what makes search engines tick, as well as to identify the key internal ranking factors you should consider when optimizing your site. I wrote a Perl script that speaks directly to these factors by performing detailed statistical analysis. This tool or one of its variants should be a component in your SEO toolkit. The idea is to analytically prove what works for different search engines.
The last section of this chapter, Putting It All Together, contains the information you need to run a script that creates a comprehensive HTML ranking report. We show pertinent excerpts from this report throughout the chapter, so please refer to the script listing for further clarification if necessary. Further study of the script is recommended.
The abundance of myths, speculations, and theories in the SEO community makes it hard to focus on what’s really relevant when it comes to ranking in the SERPs. To quantify the importance of different ranking factors, my Perl script analyzes and proves some of the theories. The rankingfactors.pl script appears in full in Appendix A.
The basic idea is to analyze the top results from the top search engines. Given a search term, the script collects the results from the major search engines, downloads those pages, and analyzes them to see why they got the rankings they did. The rest of our discussion in this chapter depends pretty heavily on the use of this script. Also note that we already discussed some of these ranking factors in some detail in previous chapters.
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