SEO Update

Introduction

Much has happened in the world of Local Search since last year’s edition of the Local Search Ranking Factors was published. We’ve seen a major quantitative study of Google Maps, detailed interviews with the heads of both Google Maps and Yahoo Local, the launch of a number of new portals, and just in the last few weeks, Google’s introduction of the Local 10-pack for generic keywords.

It is my hope that this study will help small business owners confused by Local Search, or those strapped for time, to prioritize their marketing efforts.

With that in mind, I felt that it was time to survey the experts once more to gauge the factors most helpful for ranking well in the Google and Yahoo Local algorithms, as well as techniques to be avoided. This year’s edition of the LSRF contains responses from 27 prominent bloggers and practitioners.

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Top 5 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. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains (e.g. TrustRank, Domain mozTrust, etc.)
66% very high importance

via Search Engine Ranking Factors | SEOmoz.

Navigational Queries:

Opportunities – Pull searcher away from destination; get ancillary or investigatory traffic
Average Value - Generally Low

Informational Queries:

Opportunities - Brand searchers with positive impression of your site, information, company, etc; Attract inbound links; Receive attention from journalists/researchers; Potentially convert to sign-up or purchase
Average Value - Middling

Commercial Investigation Queries:

Opportunities – Convert to member/sign-up; Sway purchase decision; Collect email; Get user feedback/participation
Average Value - High

Transactional Queries:

Opportunities - Achieve transaction (financial or other)
Average Value – Very High

#1 – Relative Search Volume from 3 Sources

There are three sources on the web that I’ve found to work best for comparative numbers research. These are:

1. Google Adwords: Keyword Tool – enter any term or phrase and get back data about both the average search volume and the volume from the previous month.

2. MSN AdCenter: Research Keywords Tool – you need to be logged in to use this, but the data is solid and shows actual counts.

3. Wordtracker: Keyword Tool – although the numbers Wordtracker shows are frequently less accurate than the two above, they are reasonably decent for estimating comparative search volume. Unfortunately, due to the declining share of Wordtracker’s data sources (the Infospace owned search engines – Metacrawler, Dogpile, DoGreatGood, etc.), niche and long tail term volume estimates can be way off.

via SEOmoz | 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research.

Title Tag Format

Best Practice:

Primary Keyword – Secondary Keywords | Brand

Or

Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keywords

Reasoning:

We recently finished our first round of intensive search engine ranking factors correlation testing. The results were relatively clear. If you are trying to rank for a very competitive term, it is best to include the keyword at the beginning of the title tag. If you are competing for a less competitive term and branding can help make a difference in click through rates, it is best to put the brand name first. With regards to special characters, we prefer pipes for aesthetic value but hyphens, n-dashes, m-dashes and subtraction signs are all fine.

Title Tag Coorelation

via SEOmoz | SEO Best Practices: SEOmoz’s New Policies Based on Updated Correlation Data.

From now on, if you wish to sculpt PageRank, you’ll want to use one of the following classic PR sculpting methodologies:

* Option A: An embedded iFrame on the page containing the links you don’t want the engines to follow (remember not to link to the iFrame URL, and potentially block it using robots.txt)

* Option B: Links that call a Javascript redirect script with access blocked for search engine bots (as Google is also now crawling basic javascript and counting links through it)

* Option C: An embed in Flash, Java or some other non-parseable plug-in that contains the desired links

* Option D: Settings that turn off links for non-cookied or non-logged-in visitors

via SEOmoz | Google Says: Yes, You Can Still Sculpt PageRank. No You Can’t Do It With Nofollow.

• Phrase search (”")
  By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Google already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will stray from it only for a good reason, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on phrase search you might be missing good results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Alexander Bell" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.
• Search within a specific website (site:)
  Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ iraq site:nytimes.com ] will return pages about Iraq but only from nytimes.com. The simpler queries [ iraq nytimes.com ] or [ iraq New York Times ] will usually be just as good, though they might return results from other sites that mention the New York Times. You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ iraq site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ iraq site:.iq ] will return results only from Iraqi sites.
• Terms you want to exclude (-)
  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words ‘anti-virus’ but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ jaguar -cars -football -os ]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the ’site:’ operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.

# Dig your internal traffic analytics for traffic drops or bad trends;

# Perform [site:yoursite.com] search in Google to see if Google reports same number of indexed URLs;

# Check if Google Webmaster Tools report any problems;

# Take a look if Google toolbar PR has changed (graybar PR might be a signal of penalty);

# Check your site ranking for a “domain-name” search (without the TLD).

via 10 Ways to Diagnose a Google Penalty.