A recent study has been conducted by SEOMoz  leading SEO experts have been invited to determine what they thought were the most important factors in achieving high rankings.  SEO experts have been invited from US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and some others.

Over 100 different ranking factors had to be evaluated by each participant, and the final results showed an interesting picture. The top 9 results were as follows:

• using keywords in the title tag
• relevant anchor text in inbound links
• global link authority of the site
• age of the site
• link popularity within the internal structure of the site
• the relevance of the inbound links
• link popularity of the site in the relevant niche
• keyword used in the text of the body
• general link popularity of the sites that link to the page

It seems that the most important facts that everyone agreed with was using the keyword in the title tag. We do know that this is important and having the major SEO guys also agree with this just reinforces all that we’ve already learned. Another important aspect is also the fact that the older the site, the better the ranking. So all things equal, a site 2 years old will rank better than a new registered site.

Another thing that is quite important, as we can see from the bullets above, is how relevant the sites linking to us are. Links coming from sites totally unrelated to the niche we are in still count, however if we can get some nice inbound links from the same type of sites will help us greatly in achieving high rankings. For example, if we’re in the acne niche and we are getting some great backlinks from some acne forums, that will count more than links from a Hollywood information blog).

So it is important to always keep these 9 points in mind when a new site is about to be setup, from purchasing or registering the domain to adding correct title tags right down to trying to get backlinks from relevant sites with proper anchor tags. All this will help in making sure that our site will shoot up in the rankings leaving other less SEO’d sites behind.