Advanced SEO Tactics (IMU)

Professor: Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz

The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights:

• Expert opinion and correlation data both agree that links are still king – around 75% of Google‘s ranking is based around (or affected by) quantity/quality of links.
• Use keywords in your title tags and as close to the beginning as possible; data shows a linear decline between the position of the keywords in the tag and the impact in search results. For example, “John’s Used Cars” would be better than “John’s dealership and repair shop for used cars.”
• Although experts recommend including keywords in your H1 tags, the data suggests that this will have little to no impact on your search results.
• Substantive and unique page content, along with page recency/freshness are some of the most of the important non-link factors.
  • Getting lots of people to link to your substantive and unique content really cranks up your SEO.
  • Static pages (with substantive and unique content, of course) aren’t bad, but they probably won’t be crawled as often (which may or may not affect your rank).
• Using W3C compliant HTML, another non-link factor, has little to no impact on your search results.
• The number of unique domains linking to you may be more important than the actual number of links. For example, 500 unique domains that link to you is better than 100 unique domains with 500 links.
• The fewer number of domains (and subdomains) you use, the better. Example:
  • http://blog.company.com – ok
  • http://company.com/blog – better
• It’s a good idea to use keywords in your URL and common keywords are probably readable even if you scrunch them all together. For less common keywords, it’s better to use a hyphen than an underscore. Example:
  • http://company.com/healthinsurance.htm – ok
  • http://company.com/health-insurance.htm – better
  • http://company.com/health_insurance.htm – worse

Here’s Rand’s presentation:

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