What order would you place these in terms of importance for SEO?
 

In my quest to convince myself that you don't necessarily need a CSS layout to create a SE topping site, I'd like to know what order would you place these in terms of importance?

-CSS layout
-Which sites link you
-What anchor sites link you with
-Content
-Traffic
-Page source validation
-anything else you can think of..

Might have forgot something important..

IMO I would say:

1. What anchor sites link you with
2. Which sites link you (1 and 2 are kind of the same thing)
3. Traffic
4. Content
5. CSS Layout
6. Page source validation

Amazing the pointless threads people will join in on here and ignore something that might actually be interesting or informative.. ahh GFY lol

I'd hit it

:(
 

Maybe if you add some nude pics you'll get a response? And fluff it with a fantastically crazy title. I agree with you though. Sometimes I'm blown away!

yes YOU should add some nude photos Ella :winkwink:

Interesting thread.. hopefully more people that know SEO better than I will join in :thumbsup

these questions are a bit like asking "how do you lose weight"... everyones experience is totally unique, based on their own network, their own sites, their own linking/backlinks etc... so you are not going to get a real meaningful answer... since there are many factors that are all inter-related and doing a few things right and a lot of things wrong can have no negative impact... or doing a few things wrong and a lot of things right can have a massive negative impact.

css/validation are most likely totally meaningless. i'm not sure how people arrived at the conclusion that google somehow got worse at reading html since 1998.... particularly when on page content plays a minor role these days. probably something that was mentioned in the patent that took on a life of its own.

there is no such thing as "seo hosting" - people use separate class c's for what MIGHT be a benefit... but Google still knows what domains you own. that's not something you can hide.

• keyword in page title
• anchor text of inbound links from external sites
• anchor text of inbound links from internal links
• total number of inbound links from external sites
• contextual relevance of the sites linking in
• keywords in the body of the site
• keyword in the domain (more so for less competitive phrases)
• keywords in the meta keywords/description (more important for msn/yahoo)

Oh well.. some of the choices in the list are totally unrelated to ranking on SE while others are too important to prioritize a particular one. Also, failing to comply with all the prerequisites won't get you far either; you must count all factors if you want to rank high, not just push one factor only.

why help the competition?

Ahh, lots of important stuff I forgot to list there.

I'd have a bit more than 800 posts in 5 years here if I sat around all day bumping stupid threads lol. I'd also be living with my mom.

domain authority
outbound links