The 200 SEO Factors to Rank in Search Results

The 200 Factors

We will cover the 200 factors that are considered by the search engine (Google) to rank your website and show up in the SERP followed by a bonus chapter which will contain detailed discussion about the   100 must do, must follow strategies to game your SEO.

The factors are categorized as per their type or functionality for a better understanding.

Use this comprehensive reference as a checklist while planning your SEO Strategy. A successful SEO Strategy comes from the cumulative effort of perfection in all the factors and not just performing a few important factors to rank.

  

BRIEF INDEX

Page Level Factors

ü  Keywords

ü  Content

ü  Multimedia

Website Level Factors

ü  Domain Factors

ü  Site Architecture

ü  Link Building

ü  User Interaction/Experience

ü  On-site Spamdexing Factors.

Brand Image-Level Factors

Social Signals

Algorithm-Based Factors

  

PAGE LEVEL RANKING FACTORS

Keywords Optimization

1.      Focus Keywords in the Content Title Tag.

2.      Keyword towards the beginning of Title Tag.

3.      Keyword in Meta tag description.

4.      Keyword in H1, H2, H3 Header titles.

5.      Keyword Placement. Preferably keywords appearing in the initial paragraphs.

6.      An optimal Keyword Density. Keyword stuffing can invite penalty.

7.      Focus keyword to the secondary keyword ratio.

8.      Quantity of the secondary keywords you are ranking for along with the focus keyword.

9.      Relevancy of Keyword Phases used.

10.   Exact match keywords ranks better.

11.   Long tail keywords are less competitive, easy to rank and more relevant to searches, hence, have higher conversion rates.

12.   Keyword Synonyms. Be cautious considered in keyword density count.

13.   Words prefixing and suffixing your focus keyword.

14.   Keyword Proximity. Other words those are almost similar in meaning.

15.   Keyword stemming. Words belonging to the same word root are considered same. “Shoe, shoes, shoelace” All these three words are considered same and counted as 3 keywords.

16.   Keyword mistypes or misspellings is like knowingly missing the target by an inch.

17.   Semantic Keywords as the focus rather than standalone keywords.

18.   Semantic keyword phases in title and meta description.

19.   Informational Keywords vs commercial keywords. Target the right content with the right type of keywords to improve conversion. Keyword punch impacts the CTR. 

Content Design for SEO

20.   Content Syndication can be spamming. If done cautiously can be helpful to drive traffic from other websites.  

21.   Helpful supplementary content like currency converters, time zone checker, on page calculators etc. are an indicator of interactive-ness and user experience which impacts page rank.

22.   Strictly avoid grammatical mistakes or usage of local lingos which are not dictionary words as they indicate non-existent words and hence poor readability factor.

23.   Content Length.1500-2000 words is optimal ^[15].

24.   Duplicate content in the same site. Strictly avoid.

25.   Duplicate content from other websites. Plagiarism prohibited.

26.   Rel=Canonical: Use this tag to prevent duplicate content indexing.

27.   Content Regency or Freshness. Stay updated with the trend. Keep updating your content at regular intervals.

28.   Frequency of updates (Update History) sends a signal about freshness factor.

29.   Readability Factor. Composition shall be constructed in proper sentences. Avoid using low frequency vocabulary, improper punctuations, inappropriate text alignment, size and style, avoid sentences too long or complex, and use paragraph style of writing and judicious usage of header tags with focused keyword in it.

30.   Consider page loading speed via HTML (crawlers by default indexes HTML texts/pages)

31.   Consider server speed, CDN usage and non-HTML related site-speed signals. (impacts user experience)

32.   Page category. Use tags and categories to structure the clustering of your web content. It ensures easy navigability and allows crawlers and readers to engage with your website better.

33.   Page tags. Grouping your articles using post multiple tags. Using focus keywords as tags is a wise practice.  

34.   Linking to References and Sources adds a credibility factor in your content. It helps in driving more web traffic. However Google does not directly use this factor (external links) in ranking your page. But it has an indirect impact, as more traffic flocks to your webpage, it sends a signal that your page is important and shall be ranked higher for that specific focus keyword.

35.   Using bullets, points and Lists impacts user experience making the content crisply “summary-ready”. It plays a crucial role in knowledge graph display. So try breaking your article into thematic parts and composing in short answer formats.

36.   Age of your article page. A page newly created get preference owing to its freshness and uniqueness, but an older page that has been updated frequently and is still receiving web traffic is offered a good page rank.

37.   Quality and usefulness of a content is distinguished by Google. Providing the most helpful answer to search query is the ultimate goal. So useful content are ranked higher as they are the help in need. Create value not just a content to display.

38.   Having a “Terms and Conditions”, “Privacy”, “About Us”, “Mandatory Disclosure”, “Sitemap” page improves web site authority.

39.   Web pages with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints are demoted from ranking high until next revision occurs and your article passes the copyright clearances. Stay away from content infringing and create unique content.

 Multimedia

40.   Image Optimization. (File size less than 100 KB, file name, Alt test, Caption, Description, URL attached, visual appeal)

41.   Page Layout is one of the most important factor for a great user experience. User experience is defined by the readability, navigability, traffic attraction, traffic retention, social sharing, online reputation (mentions), engagement (commenting) etc. Multimedia is an important component of content design layout. Placement of multimedia and textual descriptions shall be in right proportion.

42.   Files embedded in iFrame tags or scripts are not read by crawlers. So use CSS and JavaScript smartly.

  

WEBSITE LEVEL FACTORS                  

Link Building for SEO

43.   Quality of outbound Links and Inbound links. Look for links to and from websites with high domain authority and page rank score.

44.   Page linking theme. Try linking (both outbound & inbound) to and from websites in the same niche. Links from relevant websites are more helpful.

45.   Too many outbound “do-follow” links hurts page ranking. So keep an optimum number of outbound links. Apply “no-follow” tag for websites of lower quality score or page rank.

46.   Internal linking Strategy. Try to distribute the internal links among all your pages. If any particular page shares majority of internal links pointing towards it, that page ranks higher than the other pages.

47.   Quality of Internal Links. Try pointing internal links from a page of higher rank to a lower-ranked page on your website.

48.   Quality of Inbound Links. Try getting inbound links from reputed websites. It’s not the number of backlinks, it’s the quality of backlinks that counts.

49.   Affiliate Links or AdSense filled websites are often penalized by Google. Avoid too much of outbound links and crowding of the webpages with ads.

50.   Broken links are a pure turn off for your crawlers. Have no broken links at all.

51.   Back linking from reputed aged domains.

52.   Backlinks from Root Domains

53.   Backlinks from top level domains like .gov and .edu

54.   Domain Authority and Page Rank of linking websites.

55.   Links from Guest Posts. It helps in traffic exchange by readership network share.

56.   Back Links from competitors, i.e websites of the same niche. Higher they rank, the better.

57.   Links from malicious or banned websites can lower your rank. Disavow, as soon as you find them.

58.   Backlinks to Homepage are considered more valuable than links to any individual page.

59.   Number of Nofollow links. Might not pass the link juice by letting crawlers to follow the link, but as long as the link is visible, it will be followed by the readers. Referral traffic will send a signal to Google that the link is valuable and ultimately, the nofollow link also reaps in benefit.

60.   Maintain a proportion of Nofollow to Dofollow link ratio. This sends a signal to search engines that your links are natural and not sponsored.

61.   Links to and from diverse sources (websites) indicates a higher reputation and public awareness. So count in the diversity factor in your link building strategy. However, try to have links from the same niche. Diversity, but from the same  category or industry. This depicts you are a well-renowned player of that industry or a prospective market leader.

62.   Country TLD of the referring domains matter, if you want to rank your page in any particular location only. Try getting links from high PR websites in the same country TLD.

63.   Even if a link is sponsored or put on mutual agreement in exchanging link juice, project the link placement in a relevant part of your article. Keep it natural and try avoiding words like Sponsored, Ads or Link Partners etc. which directly sends a signal of link manipulation.

64.   Use a link to help the readers. Place it where it makes sense. Not just for the sake of creating a link to signal the crawlers with your association with that particular website. Google pays more attention to user experience than backlinks.

65.   Embed hyperlink on a running word in the sentence. Don’t put naked links in between the words in a sentence and distract readers leading to a poor user experience. Focus on readability while you also put links in your article. 

66.   Links are contextual and have click affinity when it comes on your way while reading the relevant sentence. Prefer putting your links in sentences, make it blend with the flow of the article. Links listed separately at the footnote of the article or in a separate page or in silos don’t really get enough attention form crawlers and readers.

67.   In case of internal links, your primary motive is to direct your readers to another page of your website. To ensure, you invoke an urgency, a curiosity or a compulsion in them to click on the link and visit the target page, try using power words in the anchor text, words that demand action right away, words that assure quick solution or result to what they are looking for. Eg. Words like Step by step, Quick, Simple, Fast, Now, Today, Right now, Made Easy etc. These words have significantly higher CTR.

68.   Anchor text of the backlinks matters, albeit not a direct factor for ranking but it counts. The anchor text indicates the search engines about the theme of the linked website. The anchor text acts as a description of the website linked. And secondly, crawlers follow the links and indexes the linked page in its database under the same keyword the anchor text mentioned.

69.   Page Rank dissipates with a number of 301 redirects. So play safe with the 301 redirect usage and if have to use, make the redirect in one layer, that is, make your redirection directly hop to the target page and not via several other pages. More layers (or pages) the crawlers has to jump, lesser is the page rank transferred. You lose your ranking score significantly with each page level redirection.

70.   Links coming from 301 redirects is similar to direct backlinks, just the link juice transfer is lesser for a 301 redirect.

71.   Link title attribution gives a textual description of the link that readers see when they hover over the link. It directly does not impact ranking, but it impacts the click behavior. More click-through rate (CTR) of a link sends a signal of relevance and importance to Google. The target webpage linked gets benefited as higher traffic helps it rank up.

72.   Link placement in the content or page. Try keeping the links towards the beginning of the content. Crawlers don’t follow more than 150 links in a webpage. So if you want to send link juice to any of your links, make sure, it is placed among the first 150 links.

73.    Linking Domain Relevancy. A domain from the same industry niche is valued more. So not just any relevant link, but links from domains operating in same industry are more valuable.

74.   Page Level Relevancy. The linking page shall act as complementary to your page and extend, verify or support your page content. Linking pages shall have content that is relevant or contextual to your content.

75.   Link sentiment. Links with a positive tone or sense that act as a review, recommendation or reference are valued higher. This ensures links are not used to refer to or create negative reviews, defamation or violate human rights by attacking identities.

76.   While linking to a certain page, ensure to use keywords that are present in the linked article tittle. This acts as a “link-context-keyword” relevancy signal.

77.   Positive link velocity. Link velocity is the rate at which you are building or receiving backlinks. A sudden influx or hike in a number of backlinks from a website sends a fishy signal to search engines.

78.   Negative Link Velocity. Avoid dropping backlinks all of a sudden. The addition or removal of backlinks shall not be a sudden influx or it might seem to be an attempt to mislead the search engines to consider links and rank the webpage.

79.   Links from top resources on the web like an encyclopedia on the relevant subject, a journal publication or an online community on that topic.

80.   Links from Wikipedia act as the most valuable reference. Although the links from Wikipedia are “nofollow” but it creates a high level of referral reputation. Wikipedia is considered as a number one reference website for the marketers to get their brand and products listed. With Google’s direct answer snippets, Wikipedia pages has gained tremendous importance as a credible source of mention.

81.   Links from authority, sites contribute more value than micro niche sites.

82.   Words preceding and succeeding the anchor text linked sends a link contextual relevancy signal to search engines.

83.   Age of the backlink, the older the better.

84.   Avoid reciprocal linking. Link Exchanging is liable to a penalty.

85.   Maintain a natural link profile. Strike a balance between all types of links and their addition-removal frequencies.

86.   Invite links from real websites not amateurish or dormant blogs.

87.   User generated content links are often considered spammy due to their irrelevancy to your page content or due to the doubtful link profile they use. So moderate user-generated content from administrators end.

88.   Optimise your website according to schema.org micro-formatting standards for better ranking. 

89.   No of outbound links impacts the page rank passing on to the linked websites. So prefer getting backlinks from pages having fewer outbound links.

90.   Share your website links in reputed forums and limit the usage. Links randomly found in irrelevant forums or comments are considered as an attempt at link spamming and hence devalued. Decorate your link in the form of a sensible comment to make your link commenting look authentic.

91.   Trust Rank of linking sites. Link to trustworthy websites only. A good link today, may turn spammy tomorrow if the domain is operating in a malicious niche.

92.   DMOZ listing gives you a reputed backlink. Make sure you put your credentials (Name, Address, Phone, Email) matching to the ones you used in your domain account, website administrators etc. to ensure authenticity of owner.

93.   Content length of the linking page. A backlink from an article of 1000 words is more valuable than a referral link from a 50 word article or snippet.

94.   Quality of the content impacts the amount of link juice you will receive from that backlink.

95.   Sitewide links are compressed to be counted as a single link.

 Technical SEO Factors

96.   W3C Validation or HTML errors.

97.   Website architecture. Go for a flatter page navigation structure. Reduce the number of clicks (layers) between your home page and the deepest page.

98.   Website Hosting Provider.

99.   Domain Provider Authority.

100.  Avoid parked domains. ^[3] If you have to reserve a domain name for future, associate it with a hosting and leave it as a one page “maintenance” or “coming soon” notified website.

101.  Having a Top Level Domain (Domain Extension). (Dot) com is easier to rank than (dot) info, (dot) biz, (dot) co.in and similar.

102.  URL Length. Too long a URL can hurt search visibility. Keep it short and easy. A simpler URL impacts Domain Name Recall Factor. Users tend to remember it better and refer more often.

103.  URL Path. Pages closer to home page get better attention. Deeper (more clicks) you need to dig for a website, tougher it is to get it indexed and ranked.

104.  Keyword in URL is not very important, but it acts as a relevancy signal in search results display, improving your Click through Rate.

105.  URL String shall be thematic. This ensures a logical flow of pages in your website and hence better user experience.

106.  Sitemap Submission. Most important factor when it comes to index ability. Site map is used to indicate Google about the presence of pages in your website rather than waiting for the crawlers to index your website automatically. Its better, you define the search engine which all pages to be indexed.

107.  Prioritise certain pages which you want search engines to rank higher than the other pages of your website. By prioritising, you are indicating search engines which pages you want to show for direct navigation in the search results display. Sitemap lists four of your highly ranked pages (or your predefined Priority pages) along with your domain name display in search results page.

108. Trust factor based ranking of Websites. Read about the patent that defines how Trust Rank is used in defining the worthiness of a web domain and rank it. So try seeding links from highly trusted websites.^[6]

109. Website Architecture. Keep it flat. A horizontal page distribution hierarchy approach to create a smooth internal linking and navigability.

110. Website Code flow. Keep it simple, remove unnecessary lines. Let the crawlers read it uninterrupted. Easier the crawl, easier is the indexing.

111. Keep your site updated with the latest language versions. Migrating to updated versions of code sends out the quality signal to search engines, improves site speed and leverages maximum usability. 

112. Number of web pages is not really a deciding factor for your search ranking. One page web design is the new trend as they are easy to navigate and convey the whole story in a single scroll without having to click and open new web pages. At the end of the day, it’s communicating and convincing your audience with your value proposition. The aim shall be providing the best user experience to your users. Enhance user interface and user interaction and not the number of web pages. Its quality not quality.

113. Site uptime-downtime ratio. If your website is under maintenance or having server level errors frequently, it impacts your rankings, because Google doesn’t want to show a blank or non-existent site to its users. So choose your hosting server wisely.

114. Server location is important for geo-specific locations. It also tends to have an impact on site loading time (albeit negligible). So better to pick your nearest server, but no compromise on service quality.

115. SSL Certificates – Must have to improve your trust factor and hence the ranking.

116. HTTPS – Search Engine Google now considers HTTPS domains compared to HTTP, as a ranking factor.

117. Use Breadcrumb Navigation. This helps in indicating the page flow path to users as well as search engine crawlers. So your pages are indexed in order of the sequence you design your navigation path.

118. As the search behaviour is gradually shifting to mobile devices, mobile friendly responsive websites are now a factor considered by search engines. Focus on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and device responsive design.

User Interaction/Experience

119. Organic Click through Rate directly impacts your ranking. A high CTR indicates Google that users are finding this link useful and visiting it. So Google lifts up the ranking order for your page for that particular focus keyword.

120.  A high CTR on multiple pages, helps you rank against multiple keywords the high traffic pages are focussed on. This improves the overall rank of your website.

121. Bounce Rate. A higher bounce rate indicates Goggle that the page does not contain helpful resources that the users are looking for when they are running the focussed keyword in search bar. So Google concludes that the page is not appropriate to show up against that focussed keyword and drops the ranking of the page.

122.  Websites with high volume of direct traffic is considered to be of higher quality as people have a recall of the website identity and directly reach out to the website for a solution rather than searching for a similar alternative.

123.  Repeat visitors are like customers retained. More repeat visitors indicates a higher reliance of users on the website which signals search engines that the website is trustworthy, qualitative and helpful.

124.  Number of sessions. Google pays high value to the user engagement factor. By mining the user navigation flow data, and page views per session, Google draws a page value score for ranking it against the focus keyword.

125. Session time is also a determinant of the page quality. So more time your users spend on your page the better. Use power words, inquisitive hooks and colloquial narrative in your content to make them stick around longer. As they read by, make them look around other pages of your website too, using the internal linking strategy.

126. Number of comments depicts user engagement. It ensures, your content has something worthy that readers care about. Comments also initiates a two way communication and a socialization between the readers and author(s).

127. Chrome Bookmarks.

Bookmarks indicate the importance of a website for you. Bookmarks impact the personalised search, device based, user based. So indirectly, your ranking or appearance in the SERP depends on the browser bookmarks as well. 

Have a look in the Patents in this regard. Retrieval from the internet.

128. Blocked Websites.

Google’s algorithm update Panda in February 2011 was aimed at identifying low quality pages. Websites blocked by users is taken as a signal to categorise them as low quality and demote from ranking high.

129. Toolbar data.

Google used the toolbar data as a signal for determining page rank until 2016. Google confirmed to discontinue using tool bar data as a factor of Page Rank.

130. User’s Search data and browsing history impacts the search results. The search engine tries to deliver results based on user behaviour in order to achieve more precision in results. 

 Algorithm signals

131. Intrusive Interstitial Penalty (2017) was improvised to identify websites aggressively promoting ads or creating an intrusion in the user experience by popping up ads. Earlier with the top heavy domain for websites and now Intrusive Interstitial update for mobiles pages, Google has sent out the message clear, it does not favour websites with ads. Even if you are using adsense, keepthe ads limited. Most importantly, it shall not distract the users or degrade the reading experience.

132. Rank Brain Update (2015) is one of the most revolutionary updates in recent times which aims at understanding the intent of the writer and determine the quality score of the article. So Rank brain can now rank your website based on the content quality. This function is based on artificial intelligence where the words are converted into vectors and categories as per their semantic meaning and tone.

So compose your articles for great user value and experience. Not just for search engines. Satisfied web traffic is a more prominent parameter for ranking.

133. Mobile Friendly Pages Update (2015) was launched to encourage websites to shift to Accelerated Mobile pages. AMP are meant to provide faster loading, ease of navigability and convenient readability in mobile devices. Check for mobile friendly and mobile usability of your website and create your AMP pages if not compatible yet. Mobile is the next big revolution in the search behaviour. In 2016, Google officially integrated AMP for its mobile search ranking list.

134. Possum Update started ranking business listings on Google Map based on address and affiliations. So it’s no more just keywords, it’s looking for authoritative affiliations, NAP, reviews & ratings and making the Map listing authentic by adding relevant images, logos, social icons (Social icons are automatically retrieved by GMB in its listing, so keep uniform NAP across website, social channels and GMB)

135. Pigeon Update (2014) is focused at making search results more localised. Displaying device location based results. So it’s more important to target local keywords, local address and map listing.

136. Google Humming Bird Update (2013) is aimed at contextual search results (Semantic SEO). Understanding the meaning of each search query keyword and showing conversational search results fast and precise. This update has shifted the focus from standalone keywords to LSI Keywords.

137. Payday Update (2013) is aimed at filtering the search results from spammy links, specifically mentioning payday loan and porn. So keep a strict check on your negative SEO and avoid link spamming.

138. Penguin update (2012) impacts Individual pages that defy from webmaster guidelines. So take care of the page behaviour (avoid malicious links, popups, ads, auto downloads), accessibility, navigability and index ability.

139. Google Pirate update (2012) was introduced to check for websites with excessive copyright infringements or violation of quality guidelines. For copyright removal, refer to the Google DCMA page.

140. Exact Match Domain Update (2012) was introduced to check low quality website domains from appearing in the SERP just for the sake of being having one or the other searched keyword in its domain.

141. Top Heavy Update (2012) was introduced to demote websites over crowded with ads. Build webpages that add qualitative value to you readers.

142. Panda Update (2011) checks websites with low quality content. So again, uniqueness, freshness, readability and usability (value addition) is what you shall focus on while composing content.

Note: There are many other algorithm updates. Till now there has been 600+ algorithm updates from Google. These are the major ones recently active and you shall strictly abide by to rank high. 

Social signals

143. Integrate your social channels. Use same email ID. Keep Name/Address/Phone (commonly known as NAP attributes) same across all platforms.

144. List your business with proper NAP and Domain Name in “Google My Business”. Google Map listing are an influential factor in search rankings.

145. Online reputation management. Use Social Analytics to fetch data related to all social content where you are mentioned. Don’t be a silent observer, be responsive not reactive. Appreciate criticisms and appraise compliments.

146. Review, Recommendation, listing websites are the new mine to dig for traffic. Ensure a good reputation in those rating web portals. 

147. Referral traffic from Twitter

148. Referral traffic from Facebook

149. Number of social mentions of the website.

150. Tweeter retweets and Facebook shares act as a quality signal.

151. Facebook page likes and tweeter followers act as a brand authority signal. Social stats show up automatically against search results. Google my Business automatically retrieves the social data.

152.  Votes on social sharing sites like stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg

153. Image sharing networks like pinterest and instagram.

154. Social Account verifiability. Authorship notability. Keep limited number of editors or Admins for your social pages. An account accessed by multiple authors from different IP addresses makes a profile prone.

155.  Social Content Engagement. Measured by the number of comments, shares, mentions or tags.

 Brand signal

156. Brand Identity.

Favorable if the brand name does not resemble any other entity or nearby in spelling or appearance with other brands.

157. Brand Recall Factor.

How many times are your brand searched in search engines compared to others brands in the same niche?

158. Brand Mention in News or Media Articles.

Mention in popular established media reports sends a strong signal of notability. These also help in larger consumer awareness, equity backlink and high inbound traffic.

159. Brand Mention in Wikipedia.

As of 2017, Wikipedia is the most preferred source of reference for marketers. Wikipedia links are nofollow types (does not pass any link juice), but has a high value of reference being one of the most credible source of data on web.

160. Authorised Brand Pages in Social Media.

Social media feed (popularly the trending Twitter Feeds) appears in search results. Search engines indexes the social media profiles as well. Using uniform brand credentials like Name, Address, Phone across all platforms (Website, Social, Google Business Listing on Map, linked websites) helps in pulling relevant data. 

161.  Brand Mention in community websites like Yellow Pages and governmental Directories is a strong signal of notability.

162. Brand Mention in third party websites indicates the brand endorsements.

163. Brand Mentions by Employee on review and job search websites like Linkedin, GlassDoor etc.

164. Non-hyperlinked Brand Mentions. Google uses the text analysis while crawling the webpages. Brand references in multiple sources without hyperlinks is also considered.

165. RSS Subscribers population: If you are using a third party tool to collect the subscriber credentials, your data is mostly encrypted from crawl. If you have a larger user base, it’s recommended to use Feed Burner for RSS Subscription. Being a product of Google, it is predicted that Google can read the RSS Feed counts, and a larger subscriber base indicates the brand popularity signal.

166. Mention of Physical location, Establishment & owner details, Taxation details on website acts as a brand authority signal.

167. Sitemaps, Search tool, Mandatory disclosures, terms and condition, policy and annual reports on website are signals of brand authenticity and transparency and read by search engines.

168. Listing on Google My Business.

Listing in Google Maps increases the reach and view of the brand. Mention of the physical location, name, and phone number improves the brand credibility factor.

Web Spammings – On-page & Off-page

169. Automatically Generated Content is a process where bots are used to compose contents that would contain calculated keywords but the article would make no or little sense to users. Content is generated without human moderation, published automatically and is aimed at search engines and not for human readability.

170. Combining contents from different webpages, spinning , paraphrasing and publishing content which is mostly a collection of content from sources on the web with little difference or unique value addition are strictly dealt by search engines.

171. User Generated Spam. It is a technique of posting on forums and commenting on third party website posts with your website URL mentioned with an intent to generate backlink or attract traffic. Using bots for auto posting a particular text & URL in random websites is a kind of spam.

Make sure your posts or comments in third party websites are relevant, unique and looks natural.

172. Excessive Comment spams can ruin the user experience and over all page authority. So use comment moderation and anti-spam tools and authorised posting and commenting rights (specific rights on login options)

173. Add the nofollow tag attribute to your post comments. This will restrict passing of link juice to spammy web URLS posted in your comments if any.

174. Report spam website links to Google Spam team. This may not help you directly, but helps Google in fighting spams.

175. Using Link Schemes like paid links, auto generation of links, unnatural links (URL with rich anchor texts and no contextual meaning), over optimised keyword rich texts etc. You can report about link schemes in Webmaster.

176. Excessive link exchanges between any pair of websites (link to me and I will link to you in every post) or forming a cartel between a group of websites and passing links.

177. Design pages conforming to Webmaster Quality Guidelines and Unwanted software policy.

178. Avoid using malpractices in webpages like hidden links that redirects, automatic software installations or auto downloads without user’s consent, automatically changing user’s browser configuration like default search tool, home page etc.

179. Keyword Stuffing or irrelevant Keywords in your content demote the rankings of a website. It is the use of keywords repeatedly in a composition which might make the content look unnatural. Sometimes if websites are trying to rank for searches based on each city or state, they put a block of text with list of cities or states and country names it is trying to rank for. This is also considered as keyword spam.

180. Keyword Stuffing in Meta tags is equally harmful. It makes your webpage unnatural and your attempt to game the search engines to rank you high based on the focussed keyword.

181. Webpages with videos or images embedded from third party websites with no original content adds little value to your ranking and sometimes leads to spamming if overcrowded with media from illegitimate sources.

182. Scrapped Content is usually the duplicate content in your webpages. Texts comprising snippets from multiple sources or auto generated content with little or no uniqueness is considered a spam due to plagiarism.

183. Cloaking and doorway pages are against webmaster guidelines. This technique of ranking is considered illegal and spammy. 

184. Avoid Page Sculpting. It is basically a process of using excessive nofollow link attributes to escape your association with those links.

185. Outbound links to malicious, spammy, low quality websites is considered by search engines as a misleading your traffic to some poor or harmful websites. Avoid linking to low value, irrelevant or harmful websites.

186. Inbound links form malicious websites or webpages with a lot of spams can harm your website rankings too. Identify and block those from associating with your website.

187. Sneaky Redirects. Using page redirection to deceive or unknowingly direct the visitors to some other page is a serious crime for Google and may de-index your website as a penalty.

188. Device based Sneaky Redirect. Sometimes a visitor is redirected to a different page in case of mobile devices. This is also counted as a spam. If you need to redirect to a different URL or if you have changed your domain name and what your direct your users from old domain to the new one, use 301 redirect or Javascript redirect.

189. Websites with a lot of affiliate links or third party ads with limited original content or value addition leads to a low quality page.

190. Monitoring your website regularly for hacked content or user generated spam content is a good practice to stay clean and avoid ranking demotion or penalties.

191.  Virtually Hosted and Dedicated IP address are treated equally. Just make sure your IP address is not flagged as a spam. A spammed IP address can drastically drop yout search rankings.

192.  Unnatural link profile like excessive number of links from any particular website or phoney links from new or micro websites.

193. Excessive links from websites practicing Black Hat SEO or having spams and malwares.

194.  Links from the same Class C IP address clearly indicates a possible planned exchange of links between blog networks.

195.  Anchor text Optimization. Keep a balance while using rich keyword anchors and distribution anchor text.

196. Websites having a sudden influx of large count of links indicates a fishy activity to Google and is indexed in Google SandBox which limits the visibility or ranking of the website for time being.

197. Run a regular on and off page SEO audit and use the Reconsideration Request and Disavow tool for suspicious links. This can help in lifting penalties due to negative SEO, if any.

198. Optimising for Voice Search using long tail semantic keywords.

199. Generating webpages for mobile search index using Accelerated mobile page designs.

200. Using localised keywords for Local SEO rankings. Using multiple addresses for Google my business if you have operations in multiple locations.

#FINAL NOTE

Having said all the strategies, the golden rule to ranking comes back to the saying –

Create content for your web visitors, your esteemed readers and potential customers, not the search engines. Answer to what your users are looking for and not what the search engines are looking for. Your web rankings will boost in no time with the influx of satisfied repeat visitors. Your inbound strategy to web traffic and lead generation shall focus on the sustained long term impact and not a single click-visit. It’s a continuum of brand building through incessant customer value proposition, building an online channel of trust and loyalty.