1.2 External Ranking Factors

External ranking factors are those that are not not controlled by the website developer, although this is not strictly true for inbound links, as you will see.

Inbound links

Inbound links can help with page ranking and is the only factor not controlled by site owners (to a large degree), thereby helping search engines distinguish between genuine quality sites and those created specifically to achieve high ranking (often with no useful information). After all, interesting sites will have more inbound links because other sites want to link to worthwhile resources. As well as the amount of links, link quality (importance and relevance) has to be considered, and any of your keywords being used in their link anchor text is a bonus. Beware that search engines consider a rapid increase in inbound links as artificial promotion, resulting in lower ranking. Inbound links originating from a variety of sites all belonging to one owner or even originating from the same host are regarded as less important than normal links.

One way of checking how many inbound links (if any) your site has is by going to Yahoo search and entering link:www.yourdomain.extension. This will list how many sites link to yours (note google only lists about 25%).

Note that although site owners cannot control inbound links, they can slightly influence them, for example, by quoting their site URLs in online forums when answering questions relating to their site content.

Google PageRank (PR)

This is a numeric value (from 0 to 10) assigned to webpages by Google to represent how important they are. Many factors influence this number (which can alter daily but is updated quarterly), one of which are inbound links. The more known a page is, the higher the PR. If you download the google toolbar into your browser, it will tell you the pagerank of any web page displayed in search results that you then visit via a little green bar scale. Hovering over the scale displays the actual rank figure. Note this is particular only to Google.

In summary then, the 2 main factors affecting SEO and page ranking generally are relevance (of keywords to search words) and inbound links.

• 1.0 Search Engine Optimisation
• 1.1 Internal Ranking Factors
• 1.2 External Ranking Factors
• 1.3 Getting inbound links
• 1.4 Submitting to Search Engines
• 1.5 SEO Bad Practice
• 2.0 Web Standards
• 2.1 DTD
• 2.2 Choosing a DTD
• 2.3 Validating Pages
• 3.0 Web Summary
• 4.0 Other Web Languages
• 4.1 Javascript
• 4.2 XML
• 4.3 ASP
• 4.4 PHP
• 4.5 SQL
• 5.0 Monetizing Websites