Luckily in the world of SEO, there are organisation leaders who are actively working to supply information to the greater SEO community. This information is useful to guide us all to better quality web sites which meet user expectations and are highly visible to search engines also. The results of the 2011 survey undertaken by SEOmoz are available at www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.
SEOmoz is one such organisation who has invested heavily in the understanding of SEO. Their latest results are from a yearly detailed survey of 132 SEO experts. This part of the survey is interested in what these experts consider to be the most and least important elements in the search engine ranking process.
Additionally for the first time, they have also surveyed over 10,000 keyword search results from Google US and performed a correlation analysis of the data. The result of both surveys was fascinating for those interested in SEO.
A notable result was a 42% drop (correlation dropped from .38 to.22) in the importance the SEO experts placed on an exact match of the keyword being in the domain name. The question remains, is this a result of genuine concern, or is it because the more sites that are created and optimised, the fewer .com exact match domain names are available to relate to keywords for those industries. Therefore, the ‘experts’ have to find better ways to optimise these new sites which may be the reason, they feel the keyword in the domain name is less important.
The above argument also highlights the issue raised clearly by Rand Fishkin, that, correlation is not causation. A simple non SEO example could be:
In the everyday real world there is a high positive correlation (1.00) between being female and being pregnant. However, the reason one is pregnant is not because they are female… there are various other factors that have ’caused’ the pregnancy.
Similarly, from this survey, there is a high correlation that there will be a favourable page position when the keyword is the first word of the page title. Correlation, now causation – this result could be caused by excellent copy and page structure, which would put the keyword as the first word in a page title if possible. Similarly, the good page position could be caused by many backlinks because it is a useful and user friendly site in general.
Search Engine Academy are able to teach you in 5 days how to optimise your website and make greater use of the information that SEOmoz have so diligently identified in the world of SEO. Contact Search Engine Academy now for further information or if you would just like some clarification of the factors in the SEO survey.
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