Moz Releases Search Engine Ranking Factors
Moz released its 2015 Search Engine Ranking Factors Study last week and, as ever, it’s a mammoth study charting metrics with positive and negative correlation to rankings.
What is Moz?
Moz is a tool for measuring, monitoring and evaluating the onsite and off site aspects of a website’s level of search engine optimization as well as for managing social media accounts.
It’s an industry leading tool and quite popular.
Why do you need Moz?
- Competitive analysis: Whether you’re putting yourself up against your competitor by tracked keywords, social media growth, link profiles, Moz analysis allows you to paint a clear picture of your competitive landscape by using ranks, data, graphs that update automatically.
- On page grader: This tool provides you with the ability to grade URL’s, even your competitor’s based on keyword or phrase. Then, it shows you a list of action items that can be taken to improve search ranking for that keyword.
- Fresh Web explorer: This tool allows you to analyze online mentions of anything you want –brand, competitors, industry topics, etc, to discover the most relevant content.
- Keyword Rankings: Moz analytics allows you to track not only keyword rankings but also untracked keywords that drive traffic to your website. Insights like these make it easier to build out keyword strategy.
- User friendliness: The interface is easy to navigate and understand.
The Process
Search Ranking Factors & Rank Correlations 2015 provides webmasters, SEOs and content marketers with the latest insights regarding the most important ranking factors for high-ranking Google.com search results. These ranking factors serve as useful guidelines for SEO’s and content marketers to optimize their websites.
You know how a search engine works. You type in a search phrase and you get an answer. But do you really know how that answer is derived at?
Here’s a description of how search engines work:
- Search engines have complex algorithms called as spiders or bots that crawl the Internet link-by-link.
- Once the page is found they then create a database of the content on the web, that is stored in a huge online library called as “index” to reference later.
- Then you come in with your search query typed in search bar.
- The search engine finds millions of matching information, so it uses an algorithm in which order to display the results. (and second best, and third best…)
- The information is ready in less than one second and Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is born! What’s the best Mexican Restaurant in Phoenix?”
The Result
This study helps to see the correlations between certain page, site elements and ranking high on the SERPs. The study is based on a survey of over 150 search marketers who provided
opinions on over 90 ranking factors.
- According to the study, domain and page level links are still the dominating factor for ranking. The rankings are based on links and citation metrics like quantity and quality of links.
- Page content and structure that includes; anchor text distribution, quantity of linking root domain, quality/spamminess of linking sources are all contributors to ranking. This is followed by Engagement, which is impacted by readability and uniqueness of content.
- The quality and quantity of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google+ etc, and domain name have low importance for ranking.
The key take away is that click through rates and visitor traffic from both domain and page level will influence the ranking, as well as ways to publish great content.
