Most of our Optimization efforts are focused on optimizing sites for high quality content, lucid navigation, user friendliness, and establishing authority. I was curious to know the correlation between ranking and the factors that we place importance upon.

A sample study of web sites, belonging to the same category of products and services that rank in the first page in the major search engines, threw up results that were not very surprising.

Though there will be exceptions and several thousands of other factors that help and aid in ranking…for instance, I have not factored in visitors, or any aspects of analytics, this sample study provides a good enough insight into the factors that should be focused upon while optimizing and promoting websites.

The below-mentioned charts display the correlations between ranking and the factors.

To conclude here are the top 5 critical ranking factors in the order of importance:-

1. Content

2. Domain Age (Age matters!)

3. Alexa ranking

4. Back links

5. No of pages indexed

Your optimization efforts should not be limited to these factors alone, however, you may want to consider and place more importance to these factors while optimizing web sites.