Search engine ranking factors analysis : Moz digital marketing company survey study

Abstract

The use of the Internet increases every year in the world for multiple purposes and at significant rates. In the same way, access to electronic business and personal pages allowing commercial transactions follows these high evolution rates. Many studies on this subject have pointed that it is important for most businesses to have a web presence. The key to be found by the right product or service target audience, at the right moment, according to most of authors, lies with search engines (SE) advent. However, there had been frequently changes in search engines ranking website classification algorithms during the last years. To accomplish this model evolution, the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals must to frequently adopt to constant changes regarding ranking classification strategies from SE schemas of work. In this work the author explored a wide range of factors that may influence search engine result pages (SERP’s) and examined recent aspects of user experience over a website that are increasing importance regarding the optimization to be done over the web pages, internal and external page links, and its technical components. In addition, it seems that the user action and involvement over the website are key factors that Google will probably continue to adopt to determine websites rank in SERP’s. As an empirical study, all efforts to discover the SE website promotion ranking factors are based on trial and error activities and there is no official knowledge base regarding these protected secrets kept by the major players of this valuable market. Due to the lack of published academic research works in this area, the present work has discovered and documented SE ranking factors based on survey data by a large quantity of companies in digital marketing segment. At the end of the project the author intends to present the state-of-the-art in this field of study as well as some market perception evolution of this subject based heavily on practical experiments and most recent literature in this area. Moreover, it is growing the debate about the limits of digital marketing. Due the powerful influence of SE to market and people behavior, the presented study data and considerations raise an important forum of discussion now and in the future concerning ethics and socially acceptable limits and controls over personal information on the internet.