Before I follow up on our amazing Goals post:
I’m going to do something bad to you…
What I’m about to post here won’t cost you anything but will consume at MINIMUM, an hour of your day today – AND SO IT SHOULD.
I just came across one of the best, actually THE best single piece of information on SEO that you’ll find on the internet, PERIOD. Totally free for all.
It’s put out by an SEO company that I’ve mentioned before called SEOMOZ and I personally spent at LEAST two hours in front of it today, and I plan to spend at least a few hours more in the next week.
Here’s the article:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
There is alot of reading here so if for whatever reason you don’t want to go there, I’ll tell you the points about this article that really stuck out to me.
1. The importance of the AGE of your domain.
I haven’t used old domains for niche sites for years, even though I used to use ONLY old domains. But this panel of experts places age of domain WAY above a factor like having the keyword in the domain! So theoretically its better to have a keyword irrelevant OLD domain than a keyword stuffed brand new one! VERY interesting…
2. This panel of experts also placed, keyword in the TITLE of your page WAY WAY WAY above having the keyword in ANY of the meta tags… something to think about for your wordpress blogs – are you using SEO title tag or All In One SEO and thinking HARD about your titles?
3. They called one factor which I found fascinating “Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community” – where one expert related an experience of having a site of his getting a GREAT ranking VERY fast SOLELY because he got a link from the page that has number one for the keyword he was targetting. What they’re saying is that the opinion of your site of other authority sites THAT ARE RANKED HIGH BY GOOGLE is important – do these sites link to you? Ever mention you? Maybe it’s worth manually contacting a site like this for a link?
4. Another point them mentioned which really got me thinking was that Google will be, more and more into the future, be looking at the PERFORMANCE of your site (as they can record with things like the Google toolbar) with your users to influence rankings. For example, how long does a user stay on your page when they get there?
How often do they comment on your blog? How many direct visits does your site get? How many bookmarks? How many clickthroughs from the SERPS? This points to the all important fact that making a site that’s great for USERS is THE SAME as making a site that’s great for the SE’s!
Anyway I won’t spoil too much more of it – get over there and read it now!
Andrew
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Wow. Fantastic info. I spent at least an hour looking through all of the rankings. The most fascinating part – at least to me – is how some experts agreed wholeheartedly on some issues, while on other issues they were split. Just goes to show how SEO still falls into the “art” category rather than the “science” category. Thanks Andrew.
I agree about the title thing. It just makes sense doesn’t it. I have found that it is very easy to forget how specific and targeted the keyword focus in titles, headlines, text should be.
In recent tests where I re-focused keyword targeting for a number of sites I found…
1. Almost immediate jumps in Google SERP positioning for most.
2. One old site has still not cracked through (so there are other factors)
3. One site lost ranking – because, I assume, I did a more radical re-focusing, and has slowly started to gain ranking for the newly focused keyword.
From this last example I concluded that making changes too quickly can have a serious negative effect. This confirms what SEOs have been saying for years.
Thanks for alerting me to the seomoz discussion. There’s a lot of food for thought there and lots of wriggle room too.
Not surprised by the factors I’ve seen like title tag, nervous about the time a visitor spends…you could spend your whole life worrying about this stuff.
Best to create a good enough site and then market energetically!
All The Best
Alex
Hey Andrew
Thanks for the lead for the seomoz info.
I agree with first comment about is it
a art or science. I think it’s a little of both,
it just depends on your content and where your going with your site
Thanks
Ed McQuate
Great information on some of the topics for good SEO.
I thinks SEO is a constantly changing process.
All the points above allow me to get top ranking for my websites.
You guys really need to follow these for advices.
I couldn’t agree more with the importance of age in relation to SEO. My experience shows that older domains maintain SERP positions easily whereas brand new domains slip in the SERP’s or go into the Sandbox!