DISQUS

Drew Stauffer · 2 years ago

I agree about all your eggs in one basket. Some days I wake up and I don't want to check rankings or anything that has to do with SEO. All I want to do is try and create good content with "SEO best practices" in place and let the search engines do what their gonna do. You can waste all your time chasing algorithms, too much time if you ask me.

Lee Odden · 2 years ago

Good point Drew. I think people that only do SEO and nothing else to market a web site get a little too caught up in it. When you have multiple channels of promotion, you have a lot more to work with and less need to obsess about any one set of tactics.

Michael Martinez · 2 years ago

The study is invalid. They made no apparent effort to statistically isolate the criteria so they have not shown a correlation between any of their factors and rankings.

Lee Odden · 2 years ago

Hey Michael, I don't think there are any claims to being "statistically" valid if that's what you mean. And in that vein, it's not any more or less valid than the SEOmoz survey.

If you are aware of a credible study, feel free to share.

Brad Henry · 2 years ago

Good list of the basics but I still think the keyword in the filename does play an important role, especially for keywords that are in the medium to medium low competitive range.

dian · 2 years ago

Seems I do the same with drew did...
Create a good content everyday while let Search engine do what they should do :-)

Michael Martinez · 2 years ago

Lee Odden wrote: "If you are aware of a credible study, feel free to share."

Heh. Well, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it?

I think there are many interesting papers out there but once you venture into the realm of figuring out what works better, you paint yourself into a corner.

Isolating one factor from all others requires a lot more work than any of the studies I've read have put into the process.

Brandon · 2 years ago

Nice break down, why do you think the h1 tag had little affect ?

Suhrud Potdar · 2 years ago

Good inshort listing! but to make these effective you need to have a good content!

Whatever versions the search engines upgrade to, one thing they cant go without is -The CONTENT.

Write a good content on the targeted topic, keep adding few bits of new information to it, keeping it LIVE!

Highlight your keywords/phrases in proper grammatical sentences and marking their presence in form of document summary at start/end of document may also help both; the humans and spiders. That helps them to guess on - what the page is about. The Page Title should be well a formated sentence, commenting about the current document!

With new Google Universal Search - the content should now come in all forms- web page text, images and videos!

Lastly, I think Its a simple rule to follow - Make it appealing for the people and the spiders will crawl in!

Seo India · 2 years ago

What made you think that H1 tag is less effective then H2-H6 tags? can you please explain it in detail.

Michael Martinez · 2 years ago

It should not come as a surprise that repetitious use of keywords in the page elements has an impact on relevance. Emphasis also plays a part. But, again, the analysis is flawed because their methodology doesn't make any provision for isolating factors.

Gino Cosme · 2 years ago

If there is one thing that is true, online eMarketing tactics deserve an integrated and multifaceted approach. The same applies to SEO. The most important thing to understand is how search engines gather their information, what they seek to deliver, what possible factors could help, and what searchers themselves want in return.

Lee Odden · 2 years ago

Brandon and SEO india, H1 is probably degraded in importance/influence for the same reason meta keywords are.

Michael Martinez · 2 years ago

Lee: "Brandon and SEO india, H1 is probably degraded in importance/influence for the same reason meta keywords are."

We have yet to see any evidence that H1 headings have no impact on rankings.

BTW -- I cannot unsubscribe from the comment notifications. I keep getting a 404 error when I try to manage my subscriptions.

SEOidiot · 2 years ago

haha lol

Lee Odden · 2 years ago

Subscription management fixed.

Brian · 2 years ago

That's very interesting about the H tags. H1 probably has diminished in importance a little but to not have any effect at all is suprising to me. Most pages i come across never go deeper than an H 3 tag usually.

Mike · 2 years ago

True, the study does not list any new points but that simply means that the good old SEO rules still apply.

Of the last 10 optimized blog posts, I got each post to the first page of Google. Wanna find out what I look at?
Check out my blog.

Yann Sauvageon · 2 years ago

Well, all theses elements seem to be quite true and there is effectively nothing really new about that.

I would probably detail the inbound links factor. Indeed, a perfectly optimized website will never ranked without good links, that means:
- relevant links
- links from popular pages
- links from trusted websites
- topical links from your community
- fresh and renewing links

And to obtain those links, no better than a good and appealing content or innovative services.

SEO is all about that :
- Good content / Innovative Services
- A good technical structure
- A little push trough PR actions
- And why not, classic netlinking on major directories

David Eaves · 2 years ago

Good read, I'm suprised domain age isn't mentioned in this one though, seems to be a very big one!

Krunal · 2 years ago

So, does this study means.. content is no important or has less important??
this seems to be very unacceptable as per any SEO view

Daniel Travolto · 2 years ago

Keywords in the title are by far the most important.
I agree.

good backlinks is the second most important in my opinion

simonc · 2 years ago

Nice article and comments, very informative thanks!

Publicidad en Internet · 2 years ago

Hello,
Nothing new in Google Ranking factors study. I agree with David Eaves, what about domain age? that's really an important factor.