June 3rd, 2009 by Richard Lee
SEO Ranking Factors In 2009
Moderator:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
Rand Fishkin, CEO, SEOmoz
Laura Lippay, Dir. Technical Marketing, Yahoo
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
- How much does that H1 tag really matter, versus the number of links pointing at a domain?
- Do “authority” sites always have an advantage over other sites with less reputation?
- Is brand recognition now a bigger issue?
This session looks at on-the-page and off-the-page factors that influence web search, to understand what remains useful and what new signals are growing in importance.
Speaker: Rand Fiskin
Rand presented data based on 70 top SEO survey respondents plus data correlations based on several hundred real search results (Feb-May 2009).
Keywords used in the title tag and root domain had the highest impact on SEO ranking
On page factors:
- Header Tags (has a low correlation) – H1, H2, H3 less than 1% impact
- Alt Text (higher correlation)
- Keyword in URL (very high correlation)
- Keyword Location (closer the better)
Top Factors:
- URL
- Title Tag
- Domain, path, query, sub-domain
Other Factors:
- Number of linking domains
- Link popularity
- Page content
Speaker: Marty Weintraub
Is my page strength comparable for a specific keyword query in light of keywords, page, or domain attributes?
Page Strength & SERP competitiveness in charts takes hours
Brands are now ranking higher due to Google cranking up authority score