What are the main factors in search engine ranking

[LazyD]

So I know alot of people talk about PR, traffic etc.

But in general, Google, MSN and Yahoo, what are the determining factors in search engine ranking/position?

I know the basics of meta description, titles etc. But what else should I know, especially in competitive search terms like "credit card", "get credit" etc.

 

[Stefsoft]

1st of all, make all your urls the title of your "article" using "-" like
i-love-you.html, google prefer html than htm and php/asp is hated, even if it isn't dinamic.

ALT TAGS!!! Nobody talks about it, use alt="description" on your images, alot of people search on google images and you will get traffic! And also google likes who do it.

Keyword density, google likes it!!! If you want to talk about Games, use the word Games a lot of times!

CSS, CSS!!! Google loves CSS, also keep your html clean because Googlebot follows what w3c.org tells about HTML!

Don't exchange links for a better page rank, just get 5h of free time, one big list of directories and join as much directories you can with NO RECIPROCAL LINK!!! Google likes who doesn't link and get linked!

Spead your links on forums that are famous and SE FRIENDLY!!!

SE friendly urls= .html or directories and dont have the "?"

Send Articles to websites and put your website link... Some people are making a lot of cash because of it!!!

Invest your time, also don't make your website just because of SEO, just follow those rules because who visits your website and don't like your content will not visit again or click on the ADS!

And if the first month, you don't get 10000² visitors, just keep going. On my first month i got 30 visitors average, but with really good work, i got 1st in some cathegories on google and i get 500 target visitors everyday on my websites!

A Old domain and website that got any change everytime that googlebot comes is REALLY appreciated by google.

Old domains have high page rank So if you are still with low visitors, don't worry, keep writing content for your website and someday you go to bed, wake up and see that your bandwidth has exceed.

Imagine if you wrote about 11 september and terrorists on a article before this date!!! You would be rich!

Content is the king.

 

[netzilla]

wanted to add...

a) Meta tags are useless in SEO
b) CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT
c) headings H1, H2, etc.
d) keywords in title tag
e) keywords in content - dont spam though
f) text navigation vs images
g) descriptive link text

 

[Keral_Patel]

I will also like to add. "BackLinks"

Proper backlinks from peoper sites can get you high rankings.

 

[LazyD]

Well, I would love to say that this is a content related website and im sure many of you will hate me for what my website is about.

http://getcredit365.Com

Its simply a credit card affiliate site. Theres not alot of "article" content to it. All of my pages are in .php format but dont use dynamic URLs.

The site is made completely in CSS.

I have done some link exchange as well as submitting to tons of directories.

I use some H1 and H2 tags..

I will try to add more keywords in a classy, non spammy way

I would like to write articles to go in the FAQ section of my site, but I dont know enough about credit, loans insurance to write some article about it...Any suggestions?

 

[ashu@webnewtons]

hear are some tips

a) Meta tags & ALT TAGS
b) CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT
c) headings H1, H2, etc.
d) keywords in title tag
e) keywords in content
f) text navigation vs images
g) descriptive link text
h) Blogging
i) Writing articles
j) roboot.txt
k) inbound links
l) out bond links
m) page rank
n) updates
o) submission of articles
p) use minimum flash
q) submission in search engine
r) regular updates about search engine algorithms and chage accordingly

This would help you a lot.
Thanks

 

[kektex]

-Meta tags are not useless.Especially the Meta Description tag.What you put in this tag is what google will show in your SERPs.Write a nice description that attracts visitors.DO NOT make all the meta description tags on your site the same.This is the best way to land in what is called "supplemental hell" in google.It´s better to not have any meta description than to have duplicate descriptions across your site.

-Just dozens of backlinks is not enough anymore to get ranked.You want authority links.These are links from sites related to your site.If you are making a site about "Blue Widgets" , 3 or 4 backlinks from sites considered as the authorities on blue widgets will help a lot more than 300 links from a bunch of directories or link exchange sites.

-Make your site SE friendly.That means no session ids,url parameters or that kind of stuff.Use static URLs.Some scripts like wordpress or other CMS scripts already implement this.

-Make a sitemap for your site and submit it to the google webmaster central.
There are many scripts out there that will make one for you.PM me if you need any help finding one.

-Don´t lose sleep over PR.It no longer determines how well your site will rank.I´ve had very high ranking sites with no PR.

-Read,read,read. You wouldn´t believe the huge amount of info out there about SEO. There are dozens of blogs and forums: SEOMoz,WebmasterWorld,SEOEgghead.I could go on and on.Get a bloglines.com account and subscribe to their RSS feeds.

-Aim for all other SE´s not only google. Yahoo and MSN are much easier than google, and not as temperamental.

 

[LazyD]

Thank you all for the information.

I have made a sitemap and uploaded it to Google Webmaster Central
I have a robots.txt file that denies robots to certain directories.

I would like to make a blog/RSS feed but I dont think I know enough about credit to write articles that are worth syndicating.

As far as I can tell I have multiple pages indexed with Yahoo and especially MSN, however, there not ranked anywhere that I can even find when doing a general search.

Ive almost finished up a new layout that I believe to be much more navigationally friendly, using text links with CSS roll overs instead of images with javascript rollovers.

I understand content is a huge factor, any reccomendations on what content I could ad to my site? Currently the only real updates are to the credit cards, mostly APR changes etc.

Any suggestions are extremely welcome

 

[kektex]

One thing I hadn´t noticed is that you are trying to rank in a VERY competitive niche for very competitive keywords.
A quick google search for "get credit" shows me there are 4,650,000 pages.
So it´s not going to be easy to rank for those keywords.

Try targetting what is called "The Long tail of search".
Instead of targetting "get credit" try targetting "get credit insometown,somecity". Or "get student credit in somecollege"

Check out this article.It has a lot of useful info:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050314-164653