What influences Search Engine Rankings?
On-Page Factors – Your Control
Things webmasters can do on their own pages and site to affect search engine positioning (they control directly)
Note: On-page factors rarely improve search engine rankings. But lack of them can negatively affect rankings.
Example: titles, h1 tags, internal links, word count, etc.
External Links – No Control
Things others do (primarily linking and social media) regarding your site. (You have little to no direct control over this. You can create your own links on sites that you control or that allow you to control them, but search engines consider that to be spamming and are constantly working to eliminate those factors.)
Example: incoming links
Social Media – Your Influence
Links and social signals that come from social media activities by site visitors. These are highly correlated with top search engine rankings, though how much of that is cause versus result of high rankings undetermined.
Examples: Links, Comments, +1’s, Links, Shares, Pins, Tweets, etc.
Correlation with top Google rankings:
On-Page Factors – 26%
External Links – 29%
Social Media – 45%
