There are many influences that determine a web pages ranking in the search engine results pages and many varied opinions as to which of these ranking influences are important and which are merely hype.

This SEO ranking influences document contains the expert opinions of 37 leaders in the world of search marketing, as collated by Rand Fishkin. Each participant was asked to score each topic out of 5, as a measure of importance.  The aggregated score is provided in the orange block to the right of each topic. The contributors are:

Aaron Wall, Andy Hagans, Ani Kortikar, Barry Schwartz, Barry Welford, Ben Pfeiffer, Bill Slawski, Caveman, Chris Boggs, Christine Churchill, Danny Sullivan, DazzlinDonna, Debra Mastaler, EGOL, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Eric Enge, Eric Ward, Guillaume, Jeremy Schoemaker, Jill Whalen, Jonah Stein, Joost de Valk, Laura Lippay, Lucas Ng (aka shor), Marcus Tandler, Michael Gray, Mike McDonald, Natasha Robinson, Neil Patel, Rae Hoffman, Rand Fishkin, Russ Jones, Ruud Hein, Scottie Claiborne, Thomas Bindl, Todd Malicoat, Wil Reynolds, Will Critchlow.

This document is an SEO ranking influences quick reference, and is broken down into the following categories:

• Keyword Use
• Page Attributes
• Site Attributes
• Link Attributes
• Negative Attributes