I had the honor to hear Rand Fishkin present the 2011 SEO ranking factors. This was probably the best presentation on SEO I have even been to and I just had to share the 4 things that I thought were amazing to learn!
130 top SEO gurus got together and filled out in depth surveys to figure out what helps you rank on Google. Rand and the SEOmoz data scientist built models and backed their findings. He did want everyone to understand that all of these findings could simply be correlations and not the root cause.
Here were my key takeaways:
#1 Getting Links is still a big part of it.
Nothing out of the ordinary here. The more people linking to you the better.
But the percentage of how much a pointing link actually matters overall dropped from 2009. In 2009 it was 67% and now it is 43%. Other factores are starting to matter more now.
#2 No follows count.
Google likes it when you comment, tweet, and have profiles across the web. It shows that you are a human and will help your links rank higher. So don’t just get people to link to your blog. Comment and contribute to other peoples blogs and social profiles.
#3 Short URLs
The norm has been the more keywords you can stuff in your URL the better. This isn’t the case based on the data Rand presented. Google does like clean URLs but try to make them short when possible.
#4 Get authority figures to tweet your link
If you can get real people to tweet about you it alerts google that you have an important link. It also helps if you can get a twitter use with authority to tweet your link (a verified account or someone with a lot of followers)
A shortened version of the presentation I saw is available online here and the complete data set finding is available here.
Did any of 4 items that I listed above surprise you?
I was a little surprised that google crawls twitter, and the way they interpret it. Its almost like twitter is its own “micro-web”, where twitter account authority is analogous to website authority in terms of weighting link backs for organic search. On the paid side of things, celebs are getting more deals with big brands for posting promo tweets. Paid and organic are both realizing the importance of twitter account authority, and it is starting to have more of an impact on external rankings and visibility.
It is kinda crazy how valuable a tweet is and how they look at authority.
I’m not sure how long Google will value twitter as more authority twitter accounts (like brands and celebs) start tweeting for money.
I like the article man. really interesting.
Good post. I agree with
“So don’t just get people to link to your blog. Comment and contribute to other peoples blogs and social profiles.”
I’ve also noticed my posts receive a lot of tweets but few comments. Are tweets the new currency?
Do you also think Google page rank is now no longer as important as it once was? Have social metrics passed out back links?
Tweets are the new currency. But not for long. Google+ is here and it will be interesting to see which has more power in 2012.
I’m not sure about Google Page Rank. Google is no longer indexing my site every week or so. It is every second! You can literally be ranked higher for a keyword in a matter of minutes.
Update: Google no longer crawls tweets. I think Google+ is where it will be now.
Tank You! It was helpful! 🙂