Posts on State of Search about ‘SEO 101’

Page level link Metrics less important, social signals more important in ranking factors?

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SEOMoz looks at what rankingfactors are important for Search engines (read: Google) every so many months/ years. This year they again consulted many SEO experts to find out what they think are the important ranking factors to keep an eye on.

At SMX Munich SEOMoz’ Rand Fishkin presented some preliminary results of that data and the data of research they did on over 10,000 keywords in the SERPS. The data is as said not definite yet but it is always nice to look at the findings so far.

The preliminary research shows not surprisingly that social signals have become much more important than two years ago, but what it also interesting is that it seems that page level metrics have become a lot less important than before. Read some findings and look at Rand’s presentation below. (more…)

SEO Tools 101: Linkbuilding – Finding Targets the Old Fashioned Way

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I may be going a little old school with this post but sometimes all the tools in the world are no substitute for a little manual digging, imagination and research.

There are some amazing tools out on the market these days and I’m a fan of an automation or two but I do think it’s too easy to rely on a tool and lose some really valuable potential link goldmines because you’re not looking in the right place. Sometimes it takes a little search engine elbow grease.

I know it should be a basic but it’s so crucial, it should also be revisited. (more…)

SEO 101: the ranking of “site:website.com” results

site_www.stateofsearch

One thing which many SEO’s tend to do is a search on site:website.com (for example on this site) within Google to see which pages are indexed by Google. It can give you a nice insight in how many pages are indexed and if there are any pages indexed you wouldn’t want to be there. Combined with a keyword you can also see which pages are ranking for that specific keyword. It can also help with determining if your titles and descriptions are right (as you can see I have some work to do).

If you do that search, you will get a list of pages indexed by Google. But how are those pages ranked? Why are they placed in that order? This was the question sent in to Google Webmasterhelp and answered by Matt Cutts. It turns out there are several reasons for why a page is placed in the rankings: (more…)

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