Ranking Ranking Factors!

[inhouseseo]

When you look at the keyword analysis, you see the following ranking criteria:

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| Page Authority | Page Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority | Root Domain Linking Root Domains |

How do you rank the importance of each of these factors from 1-4?

For example, PA, PLRD, RDLRD, DA

Please explain.

How many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

As a predictive metric, both Domain Authority and number of linking root domains are among the highest in terms of predicting a site's ability to rank for a given term, all other things being equal.

But there's a better way to answer the question. If you want to know what it takes to crack the top 5 for a given keyword, run the query through the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis tool. If your a PRO member, be sure to run an Advanced Report. This will give you a good idea why the top 10 are ranking the way they are, and what you have to do to beat them.

Each keyword is different. The reasons one set of results is returned in Google will inevitably vary from the reasons it returns a different set for a different keyword. Sometimes you need social shares, sometimes Domain Authority, sometimes raw links.  Most often, it's a subtle combination of dozens of factors.

[DougRoberts]

I don't think it's quite as simple as that.

You can take any of these metrics in isolation, you need to look at the relative strengths compared to your own site and make a judgement call. If all things are equal then if you can beat these scores, you should out-rank them, but in the real world it doesn't trend to be as simple as that, especially as you start competing for more and more competitive terms.

Looking at these four metrics can give you a quick feel for hoe strong your site/page has to be to get into the game, they can't predict the outcome.

This page might give you a feel for the relative importance of various ranking factors:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

As for your question, "how many of these factors do you normally need to get within top 5?" well it all depends!

Remember that these aren't the only factors that search engines use when ranking pages. It's perfectly possible to outrank a page that beats you in ALL of these factors by producing a page that's tightly targetted around the chosen keywords. You can beat the competition on relevancy (assuming that there the competing pages aren't so relevant!)

I would say that finding such keywords, where there's a ton of traffic and few relevant pages is rare and my guess is that this is only likely to happen for brand related keywords.