Posts About ‘ranking factors’

Google Ranking Factors 2012 in One Overview

There are many many rankingfactors. Some more important than others, some more focussed on than others. It would be nice if you just had a checklist: do this and do that and you will rank. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it doesn’t work that way. There are many factors to take in account and each one can make a difference, or not.

To get a grip on which factors are important this infographic by Martin Missfeldt is a very handy one, because it clusters rankingfactors (not all of them, but quite a few) in major topics: Social, Backlinks, Author/Brand and On page. A very nice overview. (more…)

Latest Venice Update: Locals Win, Global Amazon, Live and Apple lose

Google’s Panda Update now seems to be a monthly refresh of the Google Index, changing the search landscape constantly. It means that every month sites can either get more or less visibility.

For an SEO this can be frustrating. One month they are the winners, next month the losers. You can hardly make any predictions anymore, except for that your site needs to be ‘Panda proof’ all the time: you need the unique content and you need the value in the site.

Next to the Panda update there is the Venice update, which is focussed on improving local results in the SERPS. Sometimes things happen which you wouldn’t predict but are actually quite obvious. What was thought to be the last Panda Update showed some suprising stats in the UK for example. Searchmetrics calculated who ‘won’ and ‘lost’ in visibility. The biggest winners (Twitter, YouTube and the BBC) were not surprising. The biggest losers were: Amazon.com, Live.com and Apple.com. There is a logical explanation for that however: its the Venice Update. (more…)

Searchmetrics Dashboard To Give You Quick Insights in Search Visibility

The world of tools is going like crazy at the moment. And for a reason. Tools after all can give you insights which can help you build your brand or product. Our good friend Andy Betts wrote a great piece on that yesterday over at Searchenginewatch.

Searchmetrics is one of the tools which has been popping up everywhere in the past year. Searchmetrics today announces a new feature. They are launching an online dashboard for its Searchmetrics Essentials software with complimentary search and social metrics to anyone. Without an account you can now get information on organic and paid search visibility and visibility on Social Networks. (more…)

Eric Schmidt Confirms: The Social Signal is a Ranking Factor

Eric Schmidt can always be woken up to make a remark which might just go around the world. So when he took the stage at LeWeb 2011 last week our ears were wide open. And we were not disappointed.

Next to a lot of ‘commercial’ talk from Schmidt there were a few lines which drew the attention. For example he stated:

“The social signal, the people you ‘hang with’ is actually a ranking signal”. (more…)

Matt Cutts Explains “Google Trust”

Google uses many signals in ranking. Sometimes the rankingfactor “trust” is mentioned. But what is meant by that? Matt Cutts decided to explain. There is no ‘trustrank’, but they are looking at how believable the reputation of a page is. Google uses a lot of different words for that.

Ten New Algorithm Changes for Google: More Snippet Stuff

Google is constantly on the move. We could fill our blog entirely with Google news and changes if we wanted. Small ones, big ones, useless ones and important changes. Google itself this week decided to tell us about then changes they made to their algorithms.

The common denominator in most of the changes is meta information and especially snippets. Google seems to be pushing meta information like snippets in their algorithm to be better able to differentiate the different results. (more…)

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

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…)

The Business of SEO

SEO is a bit of an odd duck in the total mix of online (marketing) disciplines. On the one hand it’s a very techy, ‘hard’ discipline that requires a lot of skill and expertise in a wide range of fields. On the other hand, it’s probably one of the more difficult online disciplines to quantify.

Web developers, for example, have a finished product they deliver: a working website built according to the customer’s spec. Email marketers too have very clear deliverables: open-rates, click-through rates, spam reports, delivered emails – all these are very solid metrics that an email marketer can influence and report, and they tend to correlate to a financial ROI somewhere down the line.

Conversion rate optimisers have it even easier: their whole job is to map out the ROI-funnel of a website and to make it work better. And many social media marketers are as of yet still wallowing in the fuzziness of old-school, offline marketing – they get away with meaningless lingo-speak like ‘customer engagement’ and ‘brand building’. In other words, ROI isn’t (yet) a big part of the SMO business.

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Google universal ranking factors: an overview of resources

Google is much more than a search engine that searches for the best webpage to fit your request. Over the years they launched many different vertical search engines like Google News, Google Books and Google Places. More and more results from those vertical search engines tend to appear in the regular search results, creating universal (or blended) search results pages.

Because these universal results can replace regular results and ofter are placed above the regular results SEO doesn’t focus on organice results alone anymore. You need to optimise for the vertical search engines as well. All those different search engines require different approaches for ranking in their SERPs, in this article I try to make an overview of the most valuable information for ranking in Google’s universal search engines. (more…)

Ranking Matters? Some Additional Key SEO Metrics

There has been a lot of thought-provoking debate and discussion of late, (both here and elsewhere) around the issue of the importance and validity of keyword ranking as a sole measure of success in search engine optimisation.

As personalised search is now default for Google users, rank variations and swings can be witnessed first-hand by anyone trying a few searches; interacting with certain results, rinse and repeat.

Whilst I personally, think that rank checking; (providing clients are informed and educated as to the individual and variable effects of personalised search) is still a fundamental benchmark for SEO campaign effectiveness, I thought it might be useful to mention some other complementary measurements. (more…)

The value of keyword rankings

Time to tackle another trend in SEO that may not necessarily be accurate: There’s an increasingly negative attitude towards keyword rankings as viable metrics of SEO success. I’m going to argue that keyword rankings are still valuable and should be an integral part of your SEO reports.

Over the years there have been many changes to the SERPs that, according to some, heralded the end of keyword rankings. From Local Search to Universal Search, every new tweak and addition to the results pages was seen as another apocalyptic event that now, Once And For All, made for keyword rankings truly useless.

The most recent Google features that have once again reopened the assault on keyword rankings are Personalized Search and Social Search. These would really make any monitoring of keyword rankings utterly and totally obsolete, some claimed.

That’s, of course, not quite the case.

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