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?