SEO Mentor

SEOMoz recently came out with the new 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors report that is full of some great insights on what the search engines are looking at with the algorithms. Now you can disagree with all or some of what the report represents but you have to admit that it is a great report regardless.

You can find the full report at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

Here is what SEOMoz says about their report:

The following ranking factors were rated by our panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, we’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts agree the most that the factor is critical to rankings.

The Search Engine Ranking Factors in the report focuses on the following factors in regards to SEO:

• On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors
• On-Page (Non-Keyword) Ranking Factors
• Page-Specific Link Popularity Ranking Factors
• Site-Wide Link-Based Ranking Factors
• Site-Wide (non-link based) Ranking Factors
• Social Media/Social Graph Based Ranking Factors
• Usage Data Ranking Factors
• Negative Ranking Factors
• Factors Negatively Affecting the Value of an External Link
• Geo-Targeting Factors

The scale that the results are based on is by importance:

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So I recently wrote an article called Optimization Checklist and Checking It Twice! about a checklist of SEO items that I believe a lot of people forget. I want to thank all those that left comments on the post, very kind words.

We spend a lot of time with our sites and client sites on optimizing for better rankings and it is a shame when we forget the little basic things that can really affect all of our hard work.

So take a look at the article and make sure you print it out and don’t forget the checklist.

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So I am back an am a new daddy but I will get to that in my next post tomorrow. While I was gone I was reading up on my favorite blogs and came across a great article by Bill Slawski of SEObytheSea.com. Bill always has very intense and intellectual SEO Articles and his How Search Engines Can Learn From Looking at Sequences of Search Queries article was no exception.

Bill writes,

“Whenever someone searches at a search engine, they not only get information in response to their search, but they also provide information to the search engine about the things they are searching for – information which the search engine might find useful in helping other searchers.

If that searcher performs another search related to their first search, then the search engine might create an association between the two search phrases that the searcher used, if the two phrases appear to be related. If they perform a series, or sequence, of searches on a concept, then the search engine might take advantage of that information.”

If you are not following Bill at SEObytheSea.com then you are crazy! So I am going to make it easy for you, go to http://www.seobythesea.com/?feed=rss2 now and subscribe to his RSS Feed.

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So have you ever wanted to know how to design your website for the Search Engines let the SEO Rapper below give you the down low:

Design Coding Video – SEO Rapper

I really thought that video was hilarious and also had some great content as well. I also found this great article from Shari Thurow of Searchengineland.com.
The “Design” Part Of Search Engine Friendly Design

She writes, “What concerns me is how the term “search engine friendly design” has been twisted to have different meanings, mostly centered around URL structure. Granted, part of having a search engine friendly web site is providing access to keyword-focused content…..A site’s URL structure is crucial for search engine access. Additionally, in search engine results pages (SERPs), keywords in the URL are highlighted to increase user confidence in search results. However, a page’s URL structure is not the only part of the interface.”

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So I was fishing through Sphinn.com a great SEO news site that is much like Digg.com. Anyways I found this great article about optimizing PDF files for the search engines. Here are a couple things that I learned from the article.

• Make sure you create text-based PDFs
• Specify document properties for the PDF
• Optimize PDF copy
• Keep the content of the PDF focused
• Specify the reading order
• Influence meta descriptions
• Tag your PDFs
• Build links into PDFs
• Save the PDF as an accessible version
• Optimize the file size for search
• Enable your PDFs for fast web view
• Use keyword-rich anchor text to link to PDFs

The article by Galen De Young of http://www.francis-marketing.com gives much more detail to these points above at his Optimizing PDF Files article, but these points that I have listed above are crucial to the Search Engine Optimization of your webpages.

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