The SEO community spends a lot of time musing as to what factors determine a website’s rank. As Google obviously won’t publish the precise ranking factors, all we can do is analyze data and insofar as we can, reverse engineer what are the most important ranking factors. A great inforgraphic that sets out 200 ranking factors is available here: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/infographic-googles-200-ranking-factors/64316/ Every SEO executive has a unique take on this but there are a whole host of factors on which all SEOs agree. For example, it is widely accepted that older domains will outrank younger ones all else being equal. This stands to reason as a domain that is 15 years old is likely to belong to a somewhat reputable company whereas one set up 15 minutes ago may not live past its first birthday. Even when SEOs agree on things that are ranking factors, we will often disagree on their weight. For example, some SEOs say that social signals (+1s, shares, tweets) will eventually overtake link metrics whereas others dismiss this as just hype. So, when Moz asks over 120 seasoned industry veterans as to which factors they think influence ranks and to what extent, we in the SEO industry take note! Moz does this survey every 2 years and the results of the survey are available here: http://moz.com/blog/weighting-the-clusters-of-ranking-factors-in-google-analytics-whiteboard-friday ; the graph of results is here:
As with most of what Moz publish, it makes for very interesting reading! Below are some of the takeaways that I noted:
- Links still dominant:
When you stop and think at the practice of relying so heavily on links to rank websites, it really does seem strange. Suppose that you had a great experience in a restaurant. Would you be more likely to go home and write a blog post and link to the restaurant’s site or like it / tweet about it? The vast majority of people couldn’t link to a site even if they wanted to! Of course, Google clings to link data because it is the data to which it has free access and because of its unparalleled expertise in analyzing links. When you listen to experts like Brian Dean from www.backlinko.com saying that “social signals will always be the next big thing”, you begin to wonder if he may be right! According to those who took part in the study, he is right, with them placing a weighting of just 7.24% on social signals. Links on the other hand account for just over 40%. So, is all this social interaction that we engage in for SEO purposes well placed? For me, ignoring social is a bad idea but the results of the survey certainly cause one to reflect should we spend all our time just building links!
- User, Usage and User Query Data.
I wrote a couple of blog posts on the subject of Banners Broker. I felt that decent people were being ripped off so tried to get the word out as best I could. While often I don’t optimize my blog posts for any keywords at all, I did do some minor on-page optimisation for the two posts on Banners Broker with the result that they did rank well for some keywords that had demand. I got some traffic from this and also got some links from other bloggers who came across my pieces when researching blog posts that they were preparing on the same subject. So, even though the traffic was never going to convert, I still think it was worth writing these posts as they brought more traffic to our site and according to those surveyed “user, usage and user query data” constitutes 8% of ranking factors. So sometimes, traffic for traffic’s sake can make sense! For anyone interested, the two posts are as follows: www.dpfoc.com/blog/what-is-banners-broker and here
- Domain Level Keyword Usage:
There is little doubt that having a keyword in your root domain helps you to rank for that keyword. This is fine for companies offering a pretty tight range of services. So, if I were setting up an accountancy practice, I would certainly give considerable thought to including the word “accountant” in my domain. Where this technique falls down a bit is that it pigeon-holes the business into that particular service. SEOMoz now wants to do a lot more than just SEO and so took the major step of renaming to Moz. So before putting a keyword in your domain, be sure that this will not act as a constraint as you add more products or services in the future.
So another survey, more analysis and the net takeaway is the same……..get more high quality links!
