There is no shortage on advice on the web with regards to what folks should do to enhance your web site's position in the search engine listings. Some folks agree, certain people disagree, and others are out-and-out confusing.

Click away when somebody advises that you employ FFA, traffic exchanges, and submissions to search engines. That's so out of date it is hard to believe.

What is relevant to get high rankings was highlighted recently via a survey performed by SEOmoz of a collection of SEO experts.

Given the consensus opinion of the SEO experts, these are the four heavy-hitter ranking factors for SERPs.

The Keywords that are Used in the Title

The use of the appropriate keywords when crafting the title tag of a web page is very important. Not only does it promote improved rankings, it also helps with the click-through from the search engine listings to your page. It is of reduced use to be listed high in the results without receiving that many clicks. The primary goal is to get as many visits to your site as feasible.

The keywords that the searcher used are bolded in the search results. When the right keyphrase of your page title is highlighted, it stands a higher opportunity of being seen and getting a mouse click. However, bolded keywords are not the only thing to think about when composing the page title.

A wisely crafted title tag, that invites the searcher to click, can result in a lot of extra clicks. It is more advantageous to get a hundred clicks from listing number 5 through having an enticing page title than 50 clicks from position number three with a bad title, right?

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

The anchor text that's used in the hyperlink that points to your web site from an external web site weighs heavily in the SE algorithms to decide what your web site is all about. In addition, what your site is focused on determines mostly what it will rank for in the SERPs.

If it's possible that you can exert any influence on the anchor text that other sites use with their links to your site, then it's an extremely productive investment of your time.

The more sites that have links to your web site employing a specific set of keywords, or variations of that keyphrase, will cause the SE's to more eagerly figure out that your site is focused on that certain keyword.

It's even better when the content of the page on your site contains that particular keyword and its latent semantic equivalents.

Universal Link Popularity of the Web Site

Search engines compute the importance of your site by using the volume of hyperlinks that point to the site. This includes both the quality of the links and the quantity of links.

The importance of your site grows in the perception of the SE's in accordance with the number of distinct web sites that have links to your site.

Building backlinks doesn't stop. There can never be enough links pointing to your site. True, one can build links too quickly and that can trigger some flags with the search engines. But, if done as an ongoing effort employing a long-term view, every link is worth the resources spent in getting it. The links all add up to an improved deemed importance of your site.

Internal Linking Structure of Your Site and Resulting Link Popularity

The fact is that some of your web pages will obtain more links than others. The pages that do not obtain a lot of external links might be the true money pages that you would aim to rank well in the search engine listings.

The internal linking structure, in addition to the anchor text utilized in the internal links, is the way to disperse PageRank inside the perimeters of your site.

Some SEO experts believe that an internal link carries the same weight as an external link. That does not mean your web site will gain high rankings by having only internal links. What it means is that you could cause a page to be ranked by pointing internal links to it even if it doesn't have a lot of external backlinks, provided that the remainder of your web site has gained sufficient PageRank from external links.

In Closing

Search engine optimization may seem daunting when one views it as a whole. However, when broken down into its focus areas, there are a few relatively easy areas one can concentrate on for the largest benefits.