If you haven’t checked out SEOmoz before, follow some of the links below and you will soon be hooked. SEOmoz are one of the top SEO agencies on the planet and if you are serious about SEO you should be following them on a regular basis.
I’m thrilled to announce that after months of hard work, SEOmoz’s biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors is finally launching. Every two years, we survey 100 of the industry’s top SEO minds. In 2009, 72 SEOs participated in the data gathering process, answering survey questions that consumed hours of time. The resulting document is an amazing aggregation of data about how search engines rank documents and, at least in my opinion, should be read by anyone serious about practicing search engine optimization.
The document contains five important sections:
The Overview – offering the most high level view of the ranking elements
Ranking Factors – the raw data, showing the importance and level of consensus for each factor; this year also includes a set of opinions on how geo-targeting across countries is perceived.
Link Building – this year, we’ve also added a section asking our SEO participants which methods they find most effective for link acquisition. I think this data is tremendously valuable and interesting for anyone seeking to engage in link building campaigns.
Additional SEO Data – we asked a few specific questions around SEO to gauge the opinions of the experts; lots of cool stuff in here, too
Contributors – a list of those who participated in the survey and details about who they are and where you can find them on the web
My great thanks goes out to Timmy & Sam here at SEOmoz, who helped create this year’s document and to all of the generous participants from across the SEO world. Practitioners in more than a dozen countries around the world, all of whom have extremely busy schedules, gave up their time to help those learning SEO get a better view of the subject – please join me in thanking them.
If you’ve got questions, feedback or want to bring up interesting topics, feel free to do so in the comments on this post.
This week we’ve got a special treat! Live from the halls of SES San Jose, our own Jen Lopez sits down with the one-and-only Matt Cutts to discuss NoFollow.
As we all know, there was some controversy about Google’s shifting views on nofollow earlier this year. So now that some time has passed and Big G has refined their position, what would Matt recommend to sites that have lots of nofollow tags already in place? Watch this exclusive interview to find out.
From Jen:
This has been a great week at SES San Jose 2009. There were lots of great sessions, informative tweets, fun swag and I’ve personally met many of our Pro members! My favorite session of the week was “Extreme Makeover: Live Site Clinic” where Matt Cutts, Greg Boser, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Tiffany Lane and Vanessa Fox (unofficially ) reviewed several websites in front of hundreds of people. The use of the rel=nofollow for PR sculpting came up in the review (imagine that). Matt Cutts recommended to a site owner that he remove all the nofollows from his site, even to non-necessary pages.
This is a subject that comes up time and time again on the SEOmoz site whether it’s in the Q & A section, or in the blog and comments. So I wanted to find out directly from Matt, what he would recommend to our users moving forward. This afternoon I sat with Matt and got his take on the conference in general as well as the use of rel=nofollow and PR sculpting. (Oh yea! And if you haven’t seen the tweets and read the posts yet, Matt got a new haircut.
Google’s Local Search is great for businesses small and large, allowing consumers to quickly compare 10 or 3 different results based on many factors.
These include customer reviews, location, photos and videos, website, company details and contact details. Reviews are sourced from major consumer review sites. Yelp.com, CitySearch.com and JudysBook.com are highly featured in local search results acting as reviews. But more on this later.
10 likely factors that influence the Google Maps algorithm, some of which I will expand on here.
1) Use of Google’s Local Business Centre-Submitting your business to the LBC gives Google data supplied by you as to your location and contact details. However, just being a member of the LBC does not mean your business will list highly in a local SERP.
2) Availability of trustworthy business data- If you are not in the LBC Google may take details from other reputable sources like YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com. If the listings are the same in all the directories it looks at, more trust is assigned to these details.
3) A business website- Although you do not need a business website to appear in Google maps or Yahoo search, if you have a webpage with keywords and location on, McGee argues it must influence the algorithm.
4) Listings in other directories-including Yelp, CitySearch, Insider Pages etc.
5) Listings in vertical directories- These can be used for customer reviews, like TripAdvisor and HotelGuide.
6) References from other websites-Links and citations from other websites that include the business name and location such as location directories and local categories of DMOZ, Yahoo Directory etc.
7) Reviews – It is unclear exactly how reviews impact the algorithm, but they do. But sometimes a business with no customer reviews will rank higher than a listed business with 5* reviews.
8) Proximity to location-SERPs used to show listings based on proximity by default, but it does not do this anymore. However, proximity still has to play a part, even if it is a reduced one.
9) User query and location prominence-the business that is been searched for will impact on how wide a location the algorithm goes, for example, someone looking for a Chinese takeaway would not want to travel more than 5 miles for it, but someone looking for a car dealer will be prepared to travel much further.
10) Does the business use other Google services? If the business takes advantage of Google map services like the coupons, it may play a part in the search results, however there are not enough businesses using these yet to make any firm judgements.
It is suggested to make sure your website has a contact page that includes all company information name, address, telephone, email, it is advised to give full details here and if possible to add these contact details to the footer of every page of your website and to use HTML.
Mobile phone usage has increased and been revolutionised by the iphone, and all mobile devices use local data from search engines and data providers so you need to be listed if you are going to be visible to this growing number of potential customers.
David Mihm’s survey of local search ranking factors- Industry experts and their opinion what influences local search results and ranking.
Location
Local business listings play a big part, but not the biggest part. Generally claiming an LBL increases the chances of getting ranked and search results can be dependent on how you have categorised your business and having a listing in every city you offer services to. Proximity to the city centroid is less important for common business categories or small areas but does come into play if you are in a niche market. The more information you include in your LBL the better as Google likes lots of trustworthy information about businesses, so include videos and photos when you can.
Keywords in the title and business listings can help, especially when competing with businesses with similar factors. However, overstuffing your title with keywords puts Google off and can work against you if it looks like spam.
On Site Criteria
The importance of on site criteria depends on what business is being searched for and the size of the area, it is given less important than other factors because some businesses get consistently good rankings without having a website. Also, some on site factors can be negative, especially duplicate addresses, POBoxs and 800 numbers as they confuse Google and are not trustworthy.
Off Site optimisation
Off site are more important than onsite factors. Links from directories and trustworthy sites can boost ratings. Citations and links from data providers and IYP portals are said to be the biggest influence on ranking behind location. The quality of the links also lays a part in ratings. Everyone agreed that local PPC advertising has a low impact on local search results and ranking.
Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are seen as important as well as businesses with ratings outrank those without. The quality of the ratings is less important in terms of ranking, but there is an obvious disadvantage in terms of conversions and click through.
Local directories for UK businesses to consider are:
Well, whadda ya know? Rand is talking about Twitter this week! Oft accused of under-utilizing his widely followed Twitter profile, Rand takes a moment this week to explain what you can do to increase the likelihood of getting yourself re-tweeted. As Twitter continues to grow and become an increasingly valid traffic driver, it’s important to consider the best ways to improve the likelihood of your tweets going viral (twiral??) via extensive re-tweeting.
You see, my biggest frustration in life is lack of time. It limits the potential of any given hour or day. I sometimes think to myself – sure, I could be running an SEO analysis on this site… OR I could be sitting next to my wife on the couch, eating chocolate and watching Venture Brothers re-runs. You can see my dilemma.
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It probably comes as no surprise that, just like nearly every other SEO in the field, I waste a lot of time doing the same tasks over and over again. Namely:
Looking up the link data of a site/page to get an idea of its relative importance from a link popularity perspective
Viewing the source code of a page to analyze the meta data, on-page content, and SEO-specific tags
And now, with the new mozbar, I’m spending 1/10th of the time it took me previously to get that critical information.
I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s say I needed to analyze my new friend Chadd’s website. Chadd sells straight edge & safety razors, but I’m not convinced he’s doing all the right things from an SEO perspective: _
Sharp razors, but is the SEO sharp?
_ Rather than going through the time consuming act of scrolling through Chadd’s nasty source code to find the answers, I can use the mozbar’s nifty “analyze page” feature, thusly: _
Screw “view source” – this rules!
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I can clearly see that my friend Chadd needs to do some work if he wants to rank “safety razor.” This view shows me data on:
The URL
Page Title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
H1
H2
HTML Text
Bold/Strong
Italic/Em
Alt Text
Meta Robots
Rel=”Canonical” usage
IP Address
mozRank (for the URL, subdomain and root domain)
mozTrust (for the URL, subdomain and root domain)
# of External Links (for the URL, subdomain and root domain)
# of Linking Domains (for the URL, subdomain and root domain)
Unfortunately, we have lost one feature – Google’s PageRank. The powers that be at Google have asked us to remove that functionality from our toolbar and we’ve complied. We know this is frustrating, but we also need to respect the engines’ wishes – after all, we wouldn’t exist without them If you’re searching for alternatives, I’d suggest SearchStatus (which has a number of cool functions) or Live PageRank (which will give you just the PR bar and you can drag it to whatever location you’d like).
The new mozbar is just launching and will likely have a few bugs – please report these in the comments below and feel free to suggest any additional functionality you’d like to see. We’ll be spec’ing fixes & upgrades in the next couple weeks
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p.s. Last time Chadd (from RetroRazor.com) and I were out together at a party, he gave me a free Retro Razor to try. Does that mean I’m obligated to put a nofollow on the link above, even though I really like the shave?
) reviewed several websites in front of hundreds of people. The use of the rel=nofollow for PR sculpting came up in the review (imagine that). Matt Cutts recommended to a site owner that he remove all the nofollows from his site, even to non-necessary pages.
