At last month’s Triangle Business Leader’s meeting for entrepreneurs who are fans of Dan Kennedy-style marketing, SEO samurai Mike Marshall talked about search engine rankings–what’s working, what’s not and what’s not working anymore.
Marshall is the go-to-guy for companies like IBM, 1-800-Flowers, AOL, and Drs. Foster Smith (my fav). But even more important, because of the high-stakes nature of the search engine world, Google, Yahoo and the like patent their search system technology to keep the others from stealing it.
Guess who the U.S. Patent Office hires to teach its patent examiners about the latest advances in search technology?
Think Like a Search Engine
Marshall’s overarching theme is that dominating your competitors with SEO strategies isn’t about tricks–it’s about thinking like a search engine.
Google, Yahoo and Bing’s goal is to make sure they deliver good quality results to the people using their search service. Because good results = happy searchers who are more likely to stick with them. (And this affects how they actually make their money.)
So their job is to give top rankings to legit websites where the searcher will easily find good content relevant to their keyword phrase. As a result, they look at numerous factors related to content, keyword relevance, site usability and site authority.
A few specific facts Marshall shared about the search engines are:
- Don’t worry about the super long-tail keywords–phrases with one to four words represent 82.5% of all searches
- Yahoo and Bing have about 25% of the search engine market
- The more words a searcher uses, the further along they are in the buying cycle
- Organic search results receive 72% of clicks, Adwords get about 28% (the Yahoo numbers are 69% to 31%)
Top Factors
Everyone wants to know what’s THE most important SEO strategy to focus to get a good Google ranking. But one insight he shared is that there are no absolutes–your competitors determine which factors are the most important.
After all, there are many industries that are still clueless about SEO. And Google can’t exactly return results that say “Oops, no one made it in the top 50, you have to go to page 6 to start seeing any results.”
So what one source says is most important may not be true for your keyword or industry. You really have to scope out your competitors on all of the ranking factors to find out for sure.
But in general, here are 13 of his tips and myth-busters to catapult your website up the search engine rankings…
On-Page SEO Strategies
- Among meta tags, the title tag is most important…the keyword tag has become useless for SEO and just ends up revealing your keywords to your competitors
- Outbound links on your website can still help your search engine ranking if you use keywords in the link text, especially is they’re to high quality, authoritative sites
- Fast page load times are regaining importance–Google Webmaster Tools offers a free page speed tester if you want to check yours
- Monitoring your Page Rank is virtually useless since Google began personalizing search results…it’s far more useful to monitor traffic to your site for your keywords
- Keyword density is not important to Google anymore, although Yahoo still counts it as a minor factor
Website Content
- Site freshness is not just about how often you update your content…new links to your site count as fresh content as well
- Despite the importance of links, content is still king because the content around the link and on the rest of the page is what makes the link valuable
- Write your website copy for visitors first, then add keywords afterward…after all, search bots don’t buy, people do
Linkbuilding
- Quality is more important than quantity…Google looks at who’s linking to the page that’s pointing to you and the pages pointing to them–going back 8 levels or more
- The strength of a link to your site depends on the strength (Page Rank) of the page the link is on, which is usually lower than the home page of the site
- Links on profile pages in online forums are essentially useless if the page is behind a password and/or if there are no other links pointing to that profile page
- Don’t ignore no-follow links, they’re still important…if your ratio of follow links and no-follow links looks unnatural to Google, they’ll penalize you for trying to game the system
- It doesn’t matter if anyone ever clicks on the links to your website–the link itself is what counts
Finally, as with nearly everything in Internet marketing, testing is the best way to know what works best for you!
