Good morning fellows, I am Siddharth and I am at SMX Advanced Seattle, 2013. I am just going to tell you about one of the sessions covered at SMX Advanced – The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors: 2013 Edition. The session was moderated by Danny Sullivan and it had people like Matthew Peters from SEOmoz, Jenny Halasz from Archology, Marcus Tober from Searchmetrics and Eric Enge from Stone Temple. It was an excellent session.
One of the things they talk about is how do search engines rank a page. It is actually done in 2 steps. Step 1: the search engine looks for relevance, that is your on page content. At this point the search engine is trying to determine if your web site has the content which supports the keyword query. It is only after the search engine determines that your website satisfies the keyword query that it moves to step 2. In step 2 the search engine looks for authority and this is determined by the quality and quantity of links. How many other websites are linking to you, the quality of those links etc. They also talked about tokenization & normalization (stemming) which is the chopping of the endings to come up with the root word. For example, when someone is searching for reviewing, review, reviews, they all come down to the same root word – review.
Jenny talked about the technical factors. For one of her clients. She says they were able to achieve an 800% increase in client revenue just by doing backend factors. By backhands factors we mean technical factors such as looking for consistence crawl patterns, proper implementation of canonical, cleaning up the code (html, JavaScript etc), duplicate content, page load times etc.
If Google has a problem crawling your site then you can check this in Google Webmaster Tools. You need to look for consistent crawl patterns, increased crawling when you make changes, lower crawling when you are not doing much in terms of updates.
She particularly dislikes duplicate content because it distributes the link value, leads to wasted crawl budget, poor user experience, Google might choose the wrong page to rank and possibly even lead to thin content penalties.
Marcus Tober talked about the web is getting fatter & he shows an interesting image of a really fat human being. By fatter he means there is a lot of garbage that is being filled nn the net and we need to make sure we do not fill the internet with garbage.
He talks about some very interesting research that his firm conducted. The research shows that the anchor text has lost relevance. He says the website must have lots of normal links like “click here”. The other point he mentioned was the correlation of the factors, number of backlinks, 34% of the time are no followed.
Finally he says that Google Plus is becoming very important and website owners must take notice of this point.
Eric does a very interesting experiment where he took a controlled set of web pages and some other web pages and he took a completely new web page which has not been indexed. He then tried different things, imagine this is a completely orphan page, Google has never seen it before. He tried to see what triggers Google to index this page. He did a Facebook like, Google plus like, visited the web page through chrome, added Google analytics code to the web page. All these actions were done separately to see what action causes the web page to be indexed the fastest.
The findings were astonishing, he found if you Google plus a page it will get page indexed the fastest. It took 4 days to get the page indexed v/s even going and submitting a link and trying to get the page indexed it took longer. While with a Facebook like it took about 8 days. So folks now you know one of the most powerful ways to get content discovered quickly is to Google Plus the web page. My own thought to this would be to build a really strong Google Plus profile as I bet that Google would certainly give that some weight.
So that was one of the first sessions from SMX Advanced Seattle, 2013.