One startup's journey into SEO
cam.ly
cam.ly
- Exact match keywords are an absolute killer when it comes to ranking
- Local beats global if your target is geographic (e.g., mysite.ca will perform better than mysite.com in Canada, particularly if the .ca is hosted in Canada)
- Number of backlinks to the specific page
- Number of backlinks to the whole domain
- Popularity of backlinks
- A variety of backlinks. Your backlinks need to look natural to Google. You want a backlink pyramid, so don't have 100 PR5 backlinks, and 10 PR0 ones. The web doesn't work that way, and Google knows it.
- For the same reason, have no follow backlinks as well. Whether they carry PR juice or not, it's unnatural for your site not to have a mix of no follow and do follow backlinks.
- Backlinks from .edu/.gov sites
- An aged domain name
- Include the keyword in the url, title tag, description, etc.
- Metatags are still important, even if Google doesn't care about them.
- Make your site as fast as you can
- Have an XML sitemap
- PubSubHubbub is excellent to get your site noticed/indexed by Google
- The number of indexed pages on your site
- How frequently is your site updated (often is better than rarely)
- Make your content unique. Duplicate content is not as much of a big deal as they say it is, but you definitely don't want to look like an autoblog in the eyes of Google (particularly in the early days of your site).
- A public whois record
- A domain registered for more than one year
- Get your site indexed in DMOZ and Yahoo Directory
http://www.seo-theory.com/2011/01/07/why-you-cannot-reverse-...
Sure Google's algorithm is continually evolving and uses 10,000 ranking factors. But the web is made of links, and links will always be trust factors for a search engine.
Google just wants to make sure they are 'genuine organic' links.
> Exact match keywords are an absolute killer when it comes to ranking
Where are these keywords supposed to be? I'm guessing exact-match domains. I don't think they matter much but that's up for debate.
> For the same reason, have no follow backlinks as well.
I think that's supposed to be "no nofollow". I dislike nofollow a lot. Some of your links are bound to end up in places that use nofollow, no need to worry about it.
> Backlinks from .edu/.gov sites
Spammers have been after those since at least 2005. I'm sure Google knows better than to place a lot of weight on those.
> Metatags are still important, even if Google doesn't care about them.
Meta keywords are dead for sure. Meta descriptions are the oldest standard way to provide a summary of your page, so you should use it. There are also many non-standard meta tags that can prove bad for your site (nocache,noindex,etc).
> PubSubHubbub is excellent to get your site noticed/indexed by Google
Dunno about that, is it any better than a regular RSS feed (and maybe a good old blog ping)?
> The number of indexed pages on your site
If you have enough "positive factors" you will have more pages indexed. How can that be a signal in itself?
> Make your content unique.
How do you measure the uniqueness of your content? Besides that, there's many types of content where uniqueness does not matter and is not expected, for example: lyrics, recipes, press releases, syndicated news and more.
(Duplicate) Content can be aggregated, filtered, commented on, mirrored, reorganised, reformatted and so on.
> A public whois record
Why does that matter? Whois obfuscation is offered by most mainstream registrars, lots of people use it. It's an effective tactic against all the unscrupulous people that mine whois records. Also plenty of ccTLDs do not expose anywhere near as much information as .com and the likes.
> A domain registered for more than one year > An aged domain name
That would be a great way to provide stale content to a lot of search queries. The rate of website creation is surely rising, why do we have to trust their content less? And with many people buying old websites in order to exploit this presumed signal, the noise has certainly gone up.
what does it matter if google makes 400 algorithm changes/year? you seem to be saying that this means there are no fundamentals to SEO and it doesn't follow.
I'm saying making lists of ranking factors is not a good idea. Not that all SEO advice is useless.
I commented on half the items in the list to show why I disagree with such lists. Yes, I've done plenty of link-building but I don't think it gives me any more authority on the subject than the next guy.
What's a more important question: "How do you measure which ranking factors matter more?" or "Have you done a lot of link-building?"
I used to track SERPs for dozens of keywords daily for all my domains (I had a lot then), however I've stopped doing than now as I wasn't getting much out of it. I may try it again in the future but I'm waiting until I get some better ideas on signals to track.
Assuming equal on-site optimisations, he with more backlinks wins.
Getting mentioned on NYT.com will yield powerful results. Posting yet another link in a related discussion forum topic won't do much.
Exact match domains also crush backlinks.
Look at it this way: having an exact match means you're committing yourself to the search term, either by being first to it or by spending a lot of money to buy the domain from whomever was first. Either is likely to be a signal of quality. Near match, however, just means you had $8 to spare. (For similar reasons, cheap-domain.com or cheapdomain.biz do not receive any bonuses.)
- PR of the page of the backlink. A backlink from a page with PR 5 is better than 20 backlinks from pages with PR 0
- However, PR is not the only matter. There is also domain authority. A page with PR0 on a site with high domain authority (like NYT) could still outrank a PR3 page.
- Anchor text of the backlink. Links like "Click here" or just a plain URL don't say a lot, in compare to "Security Camera" for example.
- Where the link is placed on the page also matters. A link at the top or in the article beats links in the comment areas or at the footer.
Can I ask, either OP or anyone else, what sort of percent of your traffic comes from SEO? I've seen it stated on the web that 70%-80% of traffic comes from searches, but for me, it's more like 5%, with adwords and direct links being the rest.
Most sites I have been involved with see 50%-70% of traffic from search. More brand equity = less importance for search.
More importantly though, search tends to convert way way better than really anything else (ppc included) when goals tracking (ie nav to contact page and thank you page).
You can probably give your traffic a lot of growth by investing more time into efforts with SEO in mind. Let me know if you need help. :)
I've managed sites with nearly 99% of traffic coming directly from search engines and some as low as 5%. It correlates directly with the type of site you are managing.
If you are targeting a very specific niche community, you would likely receive much better results injecting yourself into that community and becoming an authoritative figure and focusing on direct marketing then an all-out SEO campaign. However, if your selling cases for the iPhone 4, your much better off with focusing all of your efforts on conquering the top spots on Google.