Taking a closer look at Danny Sullivan's Periodic Table of Ranking Factors and breaking it down for the novice marketer. This is a discussion of the content and linking sections of the "periodic table". The chart can be found here: http://goo.gl/vAgVXS

1. COMPETITIVE
ANALYSIS OF
RANKING
FACTORS
TONY PASSEY

2. RANKING FACTORS
Amazing infographic taken from selnd.com/SEOTABLE

3. ON PAGE FACTORS
Content
• Quality, Research, Words, Engage
• Know your demographics and write what they want
• Remember the search engine needs to understand your intentions
based on the keywords you use.
• HMTL
• <title>Put your page title here</title>
• <meta name=“description” content=“Put here what you want to show
on your organic search results”>
• Google Authorship –
• Use “?rel=author” in the query string of a link from your page to your
G+ page
• Link back to your content from your G+ page
• Make sure your profile pic is a good one!
• Structured data checker:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

4. HEADERS
Proper H-Tagging
• <H1>Title at the beginning of your content</H1>
• <H2>Title at the beginning of your paragraphs</H2>
• <H2>Title at the beginning of your paragraphs</H2>
• <H3>Subtitle within a paragraph</H3>
• <H3>Subtitle within a paragraph</H3>
• <H4>
• <H5>
• <H2>Title at the beginning of your paragraphs</H2>
Never break the header tag hierarchy!

5. SITE ARCHITECTURE
It is absolutely critical that you have a webmaster tools
account set up and verified.
Are there any issues when Google/Bing crawls your site?
• Crawl Speed
• Crawl Errors – Check your webmaster tools
• URL structure – site/com?page_id=56 is that what you want
to rank for “page_id=56”??
• Load time
• Use inspector or firebug to see what is slowing down your
site.

6. OFF PAGE FACTORS
Link profiles are becoming one of the most important factors
in SEO
•
•
•
•
Quality of the links to your site – links from authority sites
Quantity of links to your site
Variety of pages on your site with links
How are the links linking?
• Images
• Text - <a href=“yoursite.com/page”>Best site ever</a>
• Recency and frequency of the links
Majestic SEO has a new search explorer –
http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/search-explorer

7. WHO ARE YOUR
COMPETITORS?
Use a keyword tool to develop a keyword list.
Perform searches for the keywords you like.
Once you locate top sites you can do a “whois” lookup on
them to identify location, ownership etc.
Domaintools.com will also tell you what other sites come out
of the same IP

8. WHAT WOULD YOU
LIKE TO KNOW?
Who are your competitors?
What sites do they own?
Who links to their sites?
What are their sites ranking for?
What organic terms do they rank for?

9. WHO LINKS TO THEIR
SITES?
Organic:
• Alexa.com - traffic
• Google.com – link:url.com
• Randomized list of links. Only a subset of links though.
• SEMRush – organic terms and estimated traffic
• http://marketing.grader.com by hubspot
• Majestic SEO

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