The Germany company SISTRIX conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then performed an analysis of the top 100 Google results for each keyword. Now that is a lot of data crunching! They looked at what on site factors were most likely to generate top rankings in Google. The results were as follows:
- Keywords in the title tag are important as well as in the body of the text but title tag keywords carry far more weight
- Keywords in H2-H6 tags can influence your rankings while keywords in H1 tags do not appear to have an effect (a very different view from most SEO experts)
- Keywords in bold or strong tags can positively impact your rankings
- Keywords in image file names and image alt attributes also improved a site’s rankings
- Keywords in the domain name often ranked higher
- Keywords in the file path did not help the rankings of the sites that were analyzed (again, a different view from standard SEO thinking)
- File size does not seem to have an impact on your rankings
- The number of inbound links and PageRank value had a significant impact on rankings (not surprising). They found that the number one result had 4 times as many inbound links as the number 11 result (on to the 2nd page of Google results)
The original report is in Germany but you can check out Google’s translated version.
I would encourage webmasters to test changes out for yourself. You may not be doing some of the above recommendations and it could be a good time to start. Some of the information flies in the face of traditional SEO thinking and I would not jump ship immediately. Try a few combinations out and see what works for you.
Evan Carmichael
