Alan Eustace, a Google VP of search engineering, announced last year that there are now over 200 signals that Google uses to determine document relevance for a searcher. Unfortunately, he didn’t go on to explain them all… :)
With this number of factors and constantly updating algorithms, it’s tricky when I want to explain to a site owner when training or consulting which really matter. So here are five laws of effective SEO I have defined to assess strategic focus on SEO - hopefully it's easier to remember five laws than 200!
Rand at SEOmoz is one of our favourite search marketing gurus and has just published a rough outline of the Google algorithm, using a combination of guesswork and reverse engineering.
Search Engine Journal has pointed out an excellent article by Bill Slawski on the complicated business of how search companies re-rank results.
It is important to get to grips with some of these factors if you are actively involved in SEO, since rankings can be influenced by any number of factors that may be outside of your control.