Some ranking factors cannot be measured because the search engines do not reveal the necessary data, or it would be extremely time-consuming to measure.

Make sure you pay attention to the following factors because they could prevent your website achieving a top ranking.

Inbound links to your web page

• Are the web pages linking to your web page relevant to your specific search terms.
• How fast does your web page get new links pointing to it?
• Do the web sites which link to your page belong to the same content category?
• Since when do the links to your page exist?
• Is the text surrounding the link to your page relevant to your search terms.

Your web page

• How many important links from your other pages point to your web page?
• Do the links on your web page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
• How often and how many changes do you make to your web page over time? Is your content up-to-date?
• How often and how many web pages do you add to your web site?
• How long do your visitors spend time on your web page?

Search engine result page

• Do your competitors on the search engine result page get a manual ranking boost by Google.co.uk, for example Amazon or Wikipedia?
• How many visitors of the search engine result pages click through to your page?
• How often do search engine visitors search for your company name or web page URL on Google.co.uk?

Negative ranking factors (you should be able to say “no” to all the following questions)

• Is your content very similar or a duplicate of existing content?
• Is your server often down when search engine crawlers try to access it?
• Do you link to web sites that do not deserve a link?
• Do you use the same title or meta tags for many web pages?
• Do you overuse the same keyword or key phrase?
• Do you participate in link schemes?
• Do you actively sell links on your web page?
• Do a majority of your inbound links come from low quality or spam sites?
• Does your web page have any spelling or grammar mistakes?