Hi everyone,
Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz has put together in his recent post the collective wisdom of the top 37 organic search engine optimisation professionals on search engine ranking factors that play a part in the ranking of results on Google. He states clearly that this is in no way reverse engineering of the Google algorithm. Let us have a look at keyword use factors to start with.

Keyword Use Factors:
These factors relate to the use of the user’s search query to determine the rank of a particular page.

1) Keyword Use in Title Tag:
This is an extremely important on page seo factor that makes a solid impact on the rankings in the SERPs. It is advantageous to place the keyword towards the beginning of the title tag.

A title tag gives both the user and the bot a good idea of what the page is about. Apart from the optimisation efforts, it is advisable to have an attractive compelling title that earns the user’s click rather than just a repetition of the keyword and its possible variations over and over in the 65 character length that is displayed on the SERPs. It has a high level of agreement among all the interviewed gurus.

2) Keyword Use in Body Text:
It is important to have references to the keyword phrase and its variations (with modifiers) in the body copy. The most important factor is that the copy reads naturally and does not look contrived where keyword phrases are inserted in an artificial manner.

Gone are the days of keyword density which led to keyword stuffing. It is more important that the use of keywords and their other related synonyms are relevant to the topic being discussed. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) probes this relationship but it is uncertain how much of it search engines are adopting in their algorithms today. Average agreement.

3) Topical Analysis:
This is a direct correlation of the targeted keyword phrases to the overall topical relevance of the content on a given page. The use of sematically related terms helps to associate the page with other topical pages. Ask.com has recently announced that it is incorporating semantic search in its algorithm though all major search engines have been mulling over it for quite some time.

In short, the underlying theme on a page should be very clear and this is further strengthened by the anchor text of the links with the same underlying theme, pointing to that page. Average agreement.

4) Keyword Use in H1 Tag:
Some feel that it is still very important for on page optimisation to have a relevant heading in tune with the title of the page. There is a feeling that a close alignment of the <h1> tag with the title can hurt rankings. Another school of thought feels rankings do not matter when it comes to wrapping a heading in a <h#> tag. Average agreement.

5) Keyword Use in Domain Name:
It is a divided house. Some feel that it is important to have the keyword phrase in the domain name. There is speculation over hyphenated and non-hypehnated domains with the latter having a direct bearing on the trust of the domain. If a keyword rich domain is totally in sync with the topic, then Aaron Wall feels that either the site is a leader in its topic or someone has paid big bucks to snap it up. Average agreement.

6) Keyword Use in Page URL:
A keyword in a domain gets highlighted in the SERPs which increases visibility. A big benefit would be presence of the keyword as part of the domain name in the anchor text of backlinks. It can improve the Click Through Rate (CTR) and subsequently relevancy if CTR plays a part in relevancy scores.  Another benefit is that a keyword rich URL adds to the theme of the topic in question. Average agreement.

7) Keyword Use in H2, H3, H# tags etc
These are great tags to emphasise the importance of particular terms in the body copy and still retain their weight. Another thought is that the excessive use rather abuse of these tags can lead to penalties from search engines. Moreover, the close alignment of the keywords in h# tags with the title of the page and anchor text can hurt rankings. Average agreement.

8) Keyword Use in Alt Tag and Image Titles:
It is vital for image search and can help rank images on the SERPs. When it comes to an image acting as hyperlink, the alt tag acts as the anchor text. Tagging images also helps to fortify the theme of the page if it is tune with the keywords and topicality of the content. It also benefits users with visual impairment. High agreement.

It must be remembered that the alt tag has been spammed to death in the past. It is therefore natural to assume that the search engines would not give it high weighting in the scheme of ranking pages on SERPs.

9) Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags:
It can help in highlighting the important terms on a page. But beyond that, it would not have too much influence on rankings. It may be ideal to emphasise a keyword phrase and its variations using the strong tag. Again, repeatedly excessive use of these tags may have diluted their once strong potential.

Fundamentally, search engines are based on vector spaces. Any search query is basically a vector and the algorithms do take into account matching occurences of the search vector on target results pages and calculate the relevance of the page to the original search. With on page factors playing a diminshed role and off page factors like links playing a more important role, again, anything that can be manipulated on a page will not have much weighting in the final rankings on the SERPs. Average agreement.

10) Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag:
It is very important to have a good keyword phrase rich meaningful description that gives the user and the bots an idea of what the page is about. An interesting and attractive description will gain the user click. This is also displayed as a snippet on the SERPs. Average agreement.

Now that Google has announced its support for microformats and rich snippets, it will be interesting if meta description tag will be highlighted better if placed in microformats in future purely from user perspective in gaining the click rather than any rank weighting value.

11) Keyword Use in Meta Keyword Tag:
There is total consensus on this for being worthless in the eyes of Google. It is the ultimate repository of spam and misspelled keywords on a page. It is felt that Yahoo gives it some importance but most engines ignore them.

We will look at Page level and link level ranking factors in future posts. You can have a detailed view of all the top ranking factors at SEOmoz.

Netconcepts is an Auckland SEO company that adopts best practices when it comes to optimising on page factors in the field of organic search engine optimisation.