SEO – What Matters? Survey of SEO Experts 2009

The web world moves quickly and in the shifting landscape of evolving search engines, it is difficult to determine what really makes a difference in Search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine differences, industry variants and differing opinions of the experts obscure the important factors further. Often we are left wondering, what really matters in SEO.

Despite the variety of professional opinions and SEO tactics there are some ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on a Search engine results page (SERP). It is in leveraging these factors that you can gain an advantage over your competition.


Clearly it's more complicated than just tuning up your meta data. So what  really matters?
According to a recent survey by SEOmoz the Top 5 Ranking Factors are as follows:
  • Keyword focused anchor text from external links
  • External link popularity
  • Diversity of link sources
  • Keyword use in the title tag
  • trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted domains
The old magic bullet, keyword use in meta data keywords tag placed 24 in keyword specific ranking factors and was felt to have very minimal importance. Social media, including twitter links and facebook pages also scored low with very minimal importance.
In the survey the factors were given an importance rating and a degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings. Below I've included the all the factors that received a rating of very high to high importance, so this is it, the 2009 SEO list of what matters.

On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors
  1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag - 66% very high importance
  2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag - 63% high importance 
  3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com) - 60% high importance
On-Page (Non-Keyword) Ranking Factors
  1. Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page - 65% very high importance
Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors
  1. Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from External Links - 73% very high importance
  2. External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of external links) - 71% very high importance
  3. Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains) - 67% very high importance
  4. Page-Specific TrustRank (whether the individual page has earned links from trusted sources) - 65% very high importance
  5. Iterative Algorithm-Based, Global Link Popularity (PageRank) - 63% high importance
  6. Topic-Specificity/Focus of External Link Sources (whether external links to this page come from topically relevant pages/sites) - 58% high importance
  7. Keyword-Focused Anchor Text from Internal Links - 55% high importance
Site-Wide Link-Based Ranking Factors
  1. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.) - 66% very high importance
  2. Global Link Popularity of the Domain Based on an Iterative Link Algorithm (e.g. PageRank on the domain graph, Domain mozRank, etc.) - 64% high importance
  3. Link Diversity of the Domain (based on number/variety of unique root domains linking to pages on this domain) - 64% high importance
  4. Links from Hubs/Authorities in a Given Topic-Specific Neighborhood (as per the “Hilltop” algorithm) - 64% high importance
Want to know more?
You can see all the details of the survey at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

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