Organic search optimization is gaining more and more credibility as paid search contines to become more competitive and costly. All that awareness generates interest in how exactly, search engines rank Web pages.

There are few articles that really spell it out and even those that do get outdated pretty quickly. If there’s one thing you can count on with search engines, it’s that they will change, update, and mess with their ranking algorithms. Despite the time sensitivity of ranking factors, I’ve listed links to two articles that list many important considerations on how search engines rank Web pages.

The first is an interesting list of Google Ranking factors I’ve had bookmarked for a while which lists quite a few considerations on how Google (may or may not) rank Web pages. Some of the info comes from observations and experience and some comes from a review of Google patents.

The second is a post from yesterday on Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz site where he lists an excellent article on overall Search Engine Ranking Factors. As usual, Rand’s work is exceptionally well done and professional. Danny doesn’t necessarily agree with all of them, and that’s fine. SEO is a moving target and search engines want to keep it that way.

Regardless of the details of particular search engine ranking factors, the three things that I have found to always be true in regard to rankings, at least since Google has been around, are: indexing, content, and links. Here’s a short article on better search engine rankings that provides more detail on those topics.

Tags: search engine ranking, search, Google, search engine optimization, Marketing