Top SEOs And Data Correlations

Whilst many SEOs haved focused mainly on links, it can come at the expense of content or the engagement of your audience and ignore future trends. Top search positions are meaningless unless you can convert that traffic into something meaningful to your business.
Withour descent positions in search results your less likely to get found so you need to understand, or at least know that the people you’re working with actually understand what impacts your site and its pages search positions.
Here’s some interesting data from a number of SEOMoz surveys that looked at ranking factors from 70 of the top SEO strategists worldwide and correlated that with data from hundreds of search results.conducted during 2009.

How SEO Is Affected By The Components In Google’s Ranking Algorithm

According to the experts link popularity as well as domain trust and authority were amongst the highest factors that affect SEO closely followed by anchor text and on-page keyword use.

Search results data shows that links, as they pertain to both the domain and the individual page, are vastly superior in importance to the page’s content.

Overall there appears to be a strong correlation between data and the experience of SEO’s that shows that links are a major contributing factor to a pages rank.

The Effects Of Keyword Usage On SEO

According to the SEO experts the use of keywords in title tags and domain names had a strong impact on SEO.

The correlating data shows that keywords in the URL followed by title tags were the most significant factors.

From the data on keyword usage within various parts of the URL yahoo and bing were most affected by keywords in the primary domain, path and query. However google was affected more by keywords within subdomains..

The data produced from measuring the position of keywords in title tags showed that keywords closer to the beginning of a title had more bearing on the titles implied meaning.

Whilst there was agreement that keywords in the URL and title tags had a significant impact, there was some considerable disagreement. For example;

• H1 title tags showed a low correlation with rankings.
• Alt text showed a higher Correlation with rankings.
• Keywords in URL (Very High Correlation).
• Keyword Location (Data Says Closer is Much Better).

Non-Linking SEO Factors

SEO experts were pretty unanimous that unique and substantive content made the biggest difference to SEO results closely followed by the freshness of new content in the non-link based factors.

There are more detailed factors covering link metrics, sub and root domains, geographic ranking factors.

Future SEO Factors

SEO is ever changing as search engines try and filter out the less meaningful content and serve more relevant and timely content to users.
As a result most of the top SEO experts believe that links will decline in importance as newer signals rise from usage data, social graph data and other sources to replace them.
SEO will require a multi-disciplinary as well as multi-webchannel approach to be successful and integrated marketing strategies and technologies will play a big part in making it possible for companies to generate results.
The SEO link basher will fade away in favour of the integrated SEO ninja.

Author: Nic Windley

Source : Business 2 Community

Posted in: SEO