The list of the most important search engine optimisation factors is very large and continues to grow larger by the day. Maybe it will not be growing too much larger. Sometimes we hear about a new factor, but SEO hasn’t changed too drastically in the last ten years. Still, itdoesn’t stay the same every day either.

Based on our experience and current industry data and trends, here is a brief overview of the important factors:

• Number of inbound links – the growth of natural and relevant links over time, will really help the ‘trust’ factor
• On-page content – fresh, up-to-date, user focused quality website content.
• Meta tags – well crafted and relevant title tags, etc.
• Page authority of each page – also known as Google Pagerank (although not as important these days).
• Alt tags – image tags that help the user experience on each page of a website.
• Anchor text – the anchor text used on all inbound and internal linking to a website.
• Age of a Domain – how old a domain happens to be, this is part of the trust factor or domain/website authority.
• Code to Text Ratio – how much code is contained on the page in relation to the amount of relevant content on each page.
• H1 and H2 tags – headlines of well written optimised tags

Of course, there are hundreds of other factors that influence search engine positioning in the major search engines – some of them have a negative influence.

But what is the most important factor? Still, today, after over ten years of search engine optimisation, fresh, up-to-date and relevant content is the number one factor that influences SEO. Focus on quality, original content and make everything else secondary. Not absent, butsecondary.