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| SEO Ranking Factors - the Rand Fishkin interview | ||||
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In this issue: 1. SEO Ranking Factors - the Rand Fishkin interview 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week 3. NEW REPORT: Agency Rate Card Survey 2005 4. NEW REPORT: E-commerce Solutions - A Buyer's Guide 2005 5. JOBS: New media jobs on E-consultancy 6. Top forum post: Behavioural Targeting 7. Top forum post: Measuring 'Total Visitor' Numbers |
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| 1. SEO Ranking Factors - the Rand Fishkin interview | ||||||
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Rand Fishkin is an SEO consultant based in Seattle. He runs SEOmoz.org, a community web resource dedicated to improving understanding of search optimisation and related subjects. His background spans web design and development, usability and search marketing. 1. We featured your excellent Search Engine Ranking Factors study in last week’s newsletter. What prompted you to create such a resource and did any of the results surprise you? I created it with the intention of using it as a reference resource with my own clients and the people who e-mail me through SEOmoz. When it became popular and somewhat controversial, I turned to a group of compatriots in SEO to help make the resource more authoritative and valuable. I never imagined it would become what it is, though. Humility aside, I believe it to be one of the best documents written on the subject – mostly thanks to the contributions of 12 of the industry’s top people. The version that includes the contributor comments is simply exceptional – I wish that this document had existed years ago when I was getting started in SEO. It puts to rest a lot of the myths that pervade the space and serves as a great example of what group intelligence can achieve. 2. The study still values links very highly, yet I have created pages that rank highly on content alone (on new websites). What are your thoughts on links vs content? Link popularity is absolutely critical in competitive fields. When attempting to rank for keywords that have 20+ companies all competing for the first page of results, the links you build are going to be more important than the “on-page” factors like keyword use in the title tag and repetition in the body content – anyone can do that. However, in non-competitive markets or with sites that are primarily focused on getting the “long tail” (those searches that are only performed 1-2X per month, but make up the bulk of all searches), you can do exceptionally well if you simply keep the site clean, usable and valuable. Anyone can rank a page for “blue pigeon artichokes”, but if only two or three users find your site via that search, it’s not a very valuable #1 ranking. Of course, with 5,000 pages of content, each getting only 1-2X search referrals per month, you can still do remarkably well. 3. Is link quality more important than link quantity? Absolutely. You can find sites in competitive spaces with 50-100,000 backlinks (as reported by Yahoo!, currently the most authoritative source) ranking 5-10 positions behind sites with only 500-1000 links. The difference is not only page quality (in terms of the actual value of content of the linking pages) but also the quality, reputation and trust that the search engines place in the sites that host the linking pages. 50,000 scraper sites or blog comment spam links aren’t equivalent to 10 or 20 high level links from government, educational or news sites. You also should consider the value of traffic that’s inherent in links. SEOmoz gets less than 10% of its traffic through search engines, yet receives 500-1000 visitors every day just from referring links. If a link’s sending you traffic, it’s a quality link in my book. 4. In terms of SEO, and as at October 2005, PageRank is a dead duck, right? Well, I’d say as of around January of 2004 it was more or less dead. PageRank in the Google toolbar or the directory is simply a measure of the global link popularity of a page; nothing more or less. Its accuracy is low because it’s only updated once every 3-6 months. PageRank was once important because global link popularity determined so much about a site’s ranking in the search engines, but with more engines concentrating on finding on-topic links, evaluating links based on quality, trust and anchor text and ranking sites with so many other factors, PageRank is largely an SEO relic. 5. Do you agree with Mike Grehan’s ‘the rich get richer’ hypothesis, which suggests that top ranked websites will be hard to displace over time? It’s a very good hypothesis, and my own experience suggests that he’s right. The sites ranking at the top of the results will continue to get visited more and more. More visits means more natural, incoming links from sites (as those sites’ content creators use search engines to find pages to link to) and therefore, greater numbers of valuable links. If you want to beat out an entrenched competitor in a valuable space, you’ll need a lot of link power. 6. Many major brands, particularly retailers, remain painfully inadequate when it comes to online marketing, search and e-commerce. Is the window of opportunity closing for latecomers to the web? Not yet. My opinion is that there is still 3-5 years left of great opportunity in e-tailing. Launching a brand new website today may prove tougher than it was 2 or 3 years ago, but there’s still an amazing amount of web searchers and buyers to capture. I predict that when you see trends showing that e-commerce is up and search volume for goods is down, that’s when you’ll know the market has largely been swallowed and brand loyalty has beaten out shopping via search. At that point, if you’re not in the market already, it will be incredibly hard to enter and succeed.
7. Niche websites (especially blogs) are growing in stature and can be highly visible on the search engines. Can you sum up the benefits of niche, from a search perspective? The value in a niche operation stems from the appeal of the content created by these niche sites. A blog on dog training can easily become an authority in the sector because its readership is loyal, its links are of high quality and its focus remains steady – these are the types of sites that users want to see when they type in “dog training”, so that’s what search engines want to deliver. You can take that idea as far as you’d like – offer content that searchers would give their left arm to find on any topic and if you market it well and use search friendly technology, your audience will come to you. 8. How smart do you think the search engines are in recognising related terms / words? Incredibly smart when they put their minds to it. The question for many of us in SEO is how much they’re applying that technology now or how long it will be before they do. It’s so simple for search engines, at this point, to construct intelligent ontologies (categorical structures of words and concepts) that function almost like artificial intelligence in the movies. For those who are truly interested in how search engines do this, there’s a video of Jeff Dean (a Google engineer) showing/explaining it to a group of Univ. of Washington students. 9. Making content pay remains a challenge for many site owners. What should publishers be focusing on to generate revenues / profits / value? First, if you offer content in the form of a blog or other niche medium, your value comes from your fans. Building a large base of loyal readers in your market niche should be your first goal. From there, you can monetize that traffic with advertising, although I don’t recommend Google’s AdSense program or others like it. Instead I’d find on-topic, highly relevant ads that will add value to your site. Shoot for ads that are so immersive, they almost become editorial content. Also, never link to advertisers you don’t trust or wouldn’t use – and make it known publicly that your advertisers are companies/people who you would refer to naturally. Second, you can build value by providing your own service or products. If you don’t have something definite to sell online, work on developing it. My previous example of the dog training blog could easily write a guide to dog training, combine it with some co-branded products and sell it as a package. The key isn’t just creativity, but learning enough about your demographic so you can serve them. 10. We share a mutual mistrust of the term ‘Web 2.0.’ Isn’t this just another clique / craze / collapse-in-waiting? Do web technologies really need to be branded in this manner? Yeah, I believe I wrote a post last night that asked, why don’t we just call it "lessons learned from the dot-com crash". I suppose some pandering to this kind of craze is inevitable, but I certainly don’t buy into the idea that everything created on the web needs to conform to it. If you’re going to pander to someone, pander to your customers (or readership), don’t subjugate your ideas to "Web 2.0". 11. Who are your favourite thought leaders / bloggers / SEO experts? I really like the intelligence and careful thought of Bill Slawski (who goes by bragadocchio), Ian McAnerin and Dan Thies. I’m also a fan of some folks who are trying to cross over from IR (Information Retrieval – the academic side of search) into SEO like Dr. Edel Garcia and Xan Porter, who runs the Search Science blog. As far as bloggers go, I read the usual SEO sites every day – Threadwatch, SearchEngineWatch, SEO Book and Search Engine Roundtable. But, I really enjoy some of the niche bloggers like In Search Of Stuff (humour), Patrick Gavin’s Link Building Blog and Todd Malicoat’s Stuntdubl. 12. Do you have any advice to clients who are on the lookout for an SEO agency? Questions to ask? Answers that should be setting the alarm bells ringing? The value in SEO at this point in the web’s development is ludicrously lopsided in favour of SEO clients (which is OK by me). I’ve seen so many companies who go from a few thousand in sales each month to a few thousand each day after only 6-12 months of working with a competent SEO. At this point, that kind of success is actually the rule, rather than the exception. The trick is knowing who to hire and getting yourself and your development team ready to listen and accept the advice. A good place to start is via referrals. If you know a few SEO bloggers or forum posters whose advice you continually look up to, ask them to quote you or refer you. If you have no clue of who to trust, you can start here (it’s a list of people I’ve met in person or worked with consistently). I’m familiar with their work, their competence and their professionalism and recommend them without hesitation. You can trust these folks to provide you with, at the least, a good reference. Rand was interviewed by Chris Lake, editor, E-consultancy. UK / European readers on the hunt for a search expert / agency should check out our Search Engine Marketing Buyer's Guide. Discuss search engine marketing on the forum. |
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| 2. The watercooler: stories of note in the past week | ||||||
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| 3. NEW REPORT: Agency Rate Card Survey 2005 | ||||||
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Want to know average daily charge out rates for different roles at UK new media agencies? Or how they vary depending on the size or location of the agency? The 2005 Agency Rate Card Survey answers these questions to help agencies and clients benchmarks fees. It now tracks around 50 job roles.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 4. NEW REPORT: E-commerce Solutions - A Buyer's Guide 2005 | ||||||
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This report, at 115 pages, contains a wealth of information to help you choose the best e-commerce system for your business. It includes market research and trends, plus a SWOT analysis to help you build a case for a new e-commerce platform. 14 e-commerce solutions are profiled.
View White Paper / Report » |
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| 6. Top forum post: Behavioural Targeting | ||||||
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SportNetwork's John Wards kicked off an interesting thread on the merits and challenges of behavioural targeting (more on this in next week's interview). The key issue seems to be that you need ample amounts of data to make any sensible conclusions. Can you shed any more light on this?
View Forum Message » |
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| 7. Top forum post: Measuring 'Total Visitor' Numbers | ||||||
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A megathread that has a lot of useful information and discussion on web measurement, including comment on a range of different web analytics packages, cookies and the various forms of tracking that can be employed. If you have a measurement question then this is a great place to ask it...
View Forum Message » |
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