Michael Campbell
What are the top 10 SEO factors? This question gets asked
daily, so I thought I'd provide you the definitive answer.
In addition to my tactics, I've asked Jerry West, Ginette
Degner and Dave Tropeano for their tips as well.
Here is a brief transcript of that conference call...
Michael: Here's a question from one of the Dynamic Media
Vault members about SEO, "I know that Google's algorithm is
a secret, but from your observations, what are the most
important SEO factors.
In other words, if you could pick the top 10 SEO factors and
put them in an order of importance, what would be on that
checklist?" OK, how about we each pick three and see what
we can come up with. Jerry, what would you say?
Jerry: The number one is links. Google is basically based
on links. But one thing that people tend to overlook, is
the on-page SEO. People think it's not important and tend
not to do it.
In my testing, I've learned that if you get the on-page SEO
wrong - no matter how many links you get - you are not
going to rank as high as you would, if you took care of the
on-page SEO. So let's go with number one being links.
The second most important would be your title tags. It
doesn't have the strength that once had in SEO, but if you
use your keyword phrase in the title tag, it's going to end
up as bolded text in the Google search results. It attracts
the eye. So it will get more clicks.
In addition, you want each title tag to be compelling and
attract the click. It's just like writing an ad for AdWords.
You want to do the same thing with your organic listing in
Google. You've got to sell that click.
And third, I'd probably say the heading tags, your H1s, H2s,
H3s, make sure you just have one H1. That's the largest one.
You can tinker with the size in your CSS, but what I
generally do is I have one H1, a couple of H2s, and I will
do an H3 at the bottom of each page. That will give me good
coverage.
It also allows my content to be naturally broken up with
some good headlines. That way, the reader doesn't get so
overwhelmed with content. So those will be my three.
Michael: Excellent. Ginette, what would you say?
Ginette: I'll start with the robots.txt file. It's
necessary to have one, so the crawlers know what
directories can, or cannot be crawled. In it you can put
links to your HTML sitemap and XML sitemap. Both are
necessary for speedy and accurate crawling.
The second thing is make sure your pages load fast and that
they validate. Meaning that both your HTML and your CSS
should validate with the W3 at validator.w3.org.
The third thing I look at is browser compatibility. Jerry
can attest to it. He once had an image was that corrupt and
it prevented Google from actually spidering a site.
And I've had issues where a clients' site just couldn't get
indexed. It turns out that the robots.txt was improperly
done.
Once we fixed it, Google was able to crawl the whole site
like it's supposed to. But for months, this person just
couldn't figure out what was wrong.
So a robots.txt file, code that validates, and browser
compatibility. Those would be my three.
Michael: Excellent.
Michael: OK Dave, what would you say?
Dave: I want to break down what Jerry said about links
being important. I certainly agree with that.
But I think in the broader sense, we need to look at
linking from two areas. The first one is link popularity,
which is just the raw number of links you have. And I do
think that can be important in context.
The second, more important function of linking, is link
reputation. It's basically the text in the anchor text, and
the words to the left or the right of it. So, the context
of what the link says, and where the link is, are two very
important things to consider.
My third tip is to remember that SEO in and of itself, is
always done in a context. You are competing against other
pages in the SERPs (search engine results pages). So you
also need to look at things like the domain age of your
competition.
If you end up seeing that - for a given search term - you
are competing against websites that have been around for
seven to 10 years, you may want to think twice about
entering that market. They may have a lot of incoming links
to the overall site, plus a lot of incoming links to the
actual page itself.
If that's the case, you'll need to do some competitive
analysis to look at the potential rankability, or your
likelihood of ranking. You need to determine if you can get
into the top five, or give up and move on to another
keyword phrase.
So my three would be link reputation, link popularity, and
then the domain type factors associated with your
competition.
Michael: Excellent stuff. Yes I agree with the links being
important.
Usually what I do is try to break them down. For example,
back links from quality pages, so that would be link
quality or PageRank, as far as Google is concerned.
There are back links from relevant or themed pages, so the
links carry more weight when they are in context. And then
there is the sheer quantity of links, which is also known
as the link popularity.
Part of the Google algo from the very beginning is
something called "hubs and authorities." Hubs have many
links and authorities have few links. Decide which one you
want to be.
Usually a hub will lead to an authority, which leads to
another hub. So for example, a hub might be a directory
page, which leads to an article style page that's hosted on
your site. The authority answers a question and usually
cites a hub for more links and info.
I agree with the importance of link reputation. It's that
blue clickable hypertext stuff. It builds a reputation, or
keyword phrase, for whatever you link it to.
And then the actual on-page factors or that Jerry talked
about, the actual topic of your page, which is absolutely
critical. What's really important in all this, is that the
reputation - the incoming links - match what the target
page is about.
I agree with links in context, meaning that the words
surrounding the links are important. But I'd also add that
links in the center of the page carry more weight, and they'
re not likely to be filtered out, or shingled off (as Yahoo
calls it) as part of the site template.
I also agree with competing against competition. You're not
competing against Google. Every keyword phrase is a
different playing field, where you compete against other
pages for the same keyword phrase.
Jerry mentioned keywords in page titles, keywords in
headline tags, keywords in bold and throughout the body in
naturally occurring language. All very important.
Your layout should resemble a newspaper. It needs headlines
and subheads to guide the readers and the search engines to
the important data.
There is also keyword proximity. Sometimes the keywords are
farther apart and other times the keywords are adjacent to
one another. And that just happens in naturally in language.
As for themes, yes, search engines like it when you link
from a page that's relevant to another page, if it's on the
same topic or theme.
Themes are also good for the human visitor, because they
can follow that scent of information from top level generic
keywords, into long tail specifics, where they can find the
information they need to make a purchase decision.
Ginette's got some really good points. Especially the one
about clean fast-loading code. I know for a fact that it
can prevent spider resets.
For example, if your site is in the process of being
spidered and the crawler runs into some rough code, it can
reset and go somewhere else, leaving your site unspidered.
So be sure to use CSS and HTML validation.
You'll want to make sure your graphics are uncorrupted (
which can happen with age), and that you have cross browser
compatibility. Plus you'll want to avoid long session IDs
like more than five numbers, or having question marks in
the URL if you can.
Dave mentioned the domain age, which is great. I would also
suggest checking your domain history on the Wayback Machine
or something like that, if you're considering buying a new
domain name.
The domain may have been used in the past and got banned at
some point. So if you can't seem to get any traction in
Google, log into your Google webmaster tools and submit a
re-inclusion request. That might remove the penalty on the
domain.
And that is about everything that I can think of. What do
you think Jerry, did we miss anything?
Jerry: No, I think we covered it really well. The only
thing that came to my mind are some add-ons that we
discussed in previous podcasts. We learned how the
allinanchor, allintitle, and allintext searches in Google
show exactly how pages get ranked in your market.
Sorry... but that's another show. I had to cut it off
there.
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Michael Campbell is reopening his private site, the Dynamic
Media Vault next week. Come loaded with your marketing
questions and be prepared to get custom answers, the moment
you need them. Want to become part of the club?
Come on over.
Click here.
Sincerely,
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