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August 15, 2004
What's the single most important factor in designing high-ranking Web pages?
By Stephen Mahaney
Question: "I read your book and asked a SEO specialist to take a look at my pages. She spoke about text/html ratio as the most important thing. But I didn't find this in your book. Who should I believe?"
Answer: Sometimes the terminology gets in the way. We suspect that your SEO specialist is talking about the amount of html source code relative to the viewable text content of the page itself. Since search engines index only viewable text for the most part, it's best to restrict html code to only what's essential to make your pages display properly. The less code, the easier it is for a search engine to index the page and the faster a page will load for your site visitors.
However, is text/html ratio the "most" important factor? ...hardly. And, frankly it isn't quite so easy to pin down exactly what is. There are a variety of factors that, when sewn together, become the "most" important.
Some would argue that link popularity is the most important. Others say keyword density, and still others will point to page elements such as title tags, headlines, link content, etc. and then there are some that attribute good ranking primarily to Google PageRank.
In reality, it is important that you get the combinations of these elements synchronized. That is usually best accomplished by analyzing your competition for your keywords on the target engine(s) and then designing your site/pages to beat the competition.
In competitive keyword arenas, this can be a challenging task. In others, it's relatively easy and, as you might imagine, there's everywhere-in-between. Without knowing the specifics, we can't say with any degree of certainty how easy or difficult your task will be. However, we can definitely say there isn't any one single factor that is always, in every case, the most important one.
The key is to understand the overview of the puzzle and then to put all of the pieces exactly in place so they are working together to produce the high-ranking results you are looking for.
Stephen Mahaney is Senior Editor for Planet Ocean Communications, a respected SEO research and consulting firm, which publishes an in-depth SEO book, The UnFair Advantage Book on Winning The Search Engine Wars, and the companion online publication SearchEngineNews.com.
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