Clicksharp Marketing

Some pictures are worth 1,000 words. But who’s got time to sift through 1,000 words?

To client-side marketers and search engine optimizers (SEOs) alike, two words tend to speak the loudest: “top ranked.” As in, “we are the top ranked website in Google for “auto repair” in New York City.”

But there’s nothing simple about arriving at that top ranking. With all the technical terminology, server-side nuances, markup intricacies, and keywords semantics, a lot can get lost in translation. A successful SEO project begins with a clear understanding of the workflows and inputs required to succeed — and communicating this can be a daunting task.

That’s why every SEO should be grateful to Pittsburgh-based search engine marketing firm Elliance for their regular contributions to demystifying search engine dynamics (which can be seen in the Search Illustrated column on Search Engine Land).

Last week’s post Inside The Search Algorithm was one of the best we’ve ever seen. Notice how the list evolves from tactical to conceptual to tongue-in-cheek:

Elliance explains the search engine ranking algorithms

And for anyone who’s been staring at the screen all day, here’s the list in plain text.

List of search engine algorithm criteria contributing to effective SEO:

• Keyword in URL
• Keyword in domain name
• Keyword in title tag
• Title tag 10-60 characters
• Keyword in description meta tag
• Keyword in keyword meta tag
• Keyword density in body text
• Individual keyword density
• Keyword in H1, H2, and H3
• Anchor text
• Keyword font size
• Keyword proximity
• Keyword phrase order
• Keyword prominence
• Keyword in alt text
• Keyword in links to site pages
• Link to internal pages
• All internal links valid
• Efficient, tree-like structure
• Intra-site linking
• Link to external pages
• Outgoing link anchor text
• Link stability over time
• All external links valid
• Less than 100 links out total
• Domain name extension
• Top level domain
• Hyphens in URL
• Freshness of pages
• Amount on content change
• Freshness of links
• Frequency of updates
• Page theming
• Keyword stemming
• Applied semantics
• Latent semantic indexing (LSI)
• URL length
• Site size
• Site age
• Age of page
• Page Rank
• Total incoming links
• Incoming links from high-ranking pages
• Acceleration of link popularity
• Page Rank of the referring page
• Anchor text of inbound link to you
• Age of link
• Frequency of change of anchor text
• Popularity of referring page
• Number of outgoing links on referrer page
• Position of link on referrer page
• Keyword density on referring page
• HTML title of referrer page
• Link from authority site
• Descriptive, keyword-rick text in title and description
• Referrer page: same theme
• Referrer page: different theme
• Site listed in DMOZ directory
• Expert site
• Site theming
• Page traffic
• Page selection rate
• Time spent on page
• Bookmark add/removal frequency
• How they left, where they went
• Tweet
• Time spent on domain
• Domain registration time
• Daily ranking
• Content is king, links are queen
• Content freshness adds relevancy
• Check for canonicalization issues
• Natural language content
• Give link love, get link love
• Optimize the text in your RSS feed
• Search engines like unique content that is also quality content
• Profess love of Wikipedia
• Tag stuff
• Participate in forums
• Flame thought leaders for linkbait
• Link juice
• Blog
• Above the fold
• Blogola
• Cross linking
• Collabulary
• Folksonomy
• Geotargeting
• Linkerati
• Metadata
• Mashups
• Nofollow
• Reciprocal links
• Redirects
• Relevancy
• Spiderbaiting
• Sitemap
• Trusted feeds
• Tag soup
• Webnecks
• Wikisoldiers
• Participate in social web
• Seduce a search engineer

Just in case you thought SEO could be tackled in an afternoon…

~~~~~

Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 @ 10:29 am on the category SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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