Not all Ranking Factors are important – some, like PageRank, become important in limited circumstances.

Others, like META tags, are there for usability and getting the small details right instead of having a massive impact on your Search engine rankings.

The goal here is to establish what ranking factors we need to look at in order to dominate all 3 Search Engines effectively. In this post I have included the most important search ranking factors and discussed how each is treated differently by the search engines. In specific posts later, we will look at more factors and examples on how to optimize for them.

It is quite difficult for a website to obtain top rankings on one search engine, let alone 2 or more at the same

time. Webmasters often complain that their sites rank well in Yahoo but are no where to be seen in Google, or that they rank well in Google but have no presence in MSN.

Developing a strategy that can take on Google, Yahoo and MSN all at once (let’s throw in Ask as well for good measure) is difficult, but not impossible.

In the previous posts you saw how each search engine behaved and ranked websites. In this post, I am

going to start off by giving you a brief overview on Ask (the 4th most popular search engine) and then we will

talk about the key searching Engine Ranking Factors that will help you rank high on all search engines.

I will also be talking about the Google Sandbox and PageRank, and why these two are important to understand and how you can benefit from them – yes, once you think about it, there is a definite way to benefit from the ‘Sandbox effect’.

Will you automatically top Google, Yahoo and MSN after following this advice to the letter T? No, you will not.

However, I can assure you that there are different keys to ranking in all three search engines and based on the

principles described in this blog, you can do very well in them.

Top? Cannot say for sure.

Page 1? Very, very possible ;-)