When we think of optimizing a website, most of us consider 3 major players – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Basically, if you can safely rank on the first page for those three engines you have 99% of the Internet search consumers covered. A recent Fortune Interactive research paper compared the differences in how some of the algorithms analyze website characteristics. The researchers chose inbound link quality simply because it could be equally compared across all three algorithms definitively.
“It turns out that it’s actually the quality of [inbound links] than the quantity that wins the day,” said Michael Marshall, VP of technology at Fortune Interactive.
At Google, inbound links rank in the following order: quality, relevance, title keyword, anchor keyword, quantity. Further down the list, site factors such as title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword, content relevance and title content weigh into the equation.
Yahoo places the most importance on inbound link quality. To a lesser degree than Google, it looks at inbound links for relevance, anchor keyword, title keyword and quantity. Further down in organic results priority are general site characteristics like title content, title keyword, anchor keyword, body keyword and content relevance.
Inbound links rank at the top of MSN’s equation as well, but are ordered differently. Inbound links are looked at for quality, anchor keyword, relevance, and title keyword. Inbound link quantity is weighted, but not quite as heavily. The search engine then looks at title keyword, body keyword, anchor keyword, content relevance, and title content.
“We not only know the order of importance but also the degree of relative importance for the on-page and off-page factors in a competitive landscape,” the report stated.
Here at SimpleSEM we see Companies participate in paid search despite rising CPCs and reported increases in click fraud who are spending more of the budgets on search engine optimization (SEO) every Quarter. As CPC prices continually rise, Organic or Natural Search Optimization becomes a higher ROI vehicle for most eCommerce and Search dependent businesses.
Google may have television advertising in the cross-hairs. CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that viewers shouldn’t have to stand for tv commercials that are a “waste of your time” and says Google is planning to deliver “targeted measurable television ads.” 
