2009 search Engine ranking factors

At the 2009 SMX advanced conference in Seattle Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ gave a very interesting presentation on the factors that he and his colleagues have assessed as being the most powerful influences upon a site’s ranking in the Google SERPs.

SEOMOZ have a great reputation in the search industry for the quality of their data and some neat tools available from their website. Back in 2005 they published their first series of ranking factors, collated from information gathered from people in the SEO industry. This popular publication was updated in 2007 and looks set for another update with the latest information.

Although many of the fundamentals, highlighted in 2005 and 2007, remain the same there are some notable observations based upon correlation. This time, rather than rely upon the feedback provided by notable individuals from the SEO industry, SEOMOZ have sought correlation in the search results provided by Google.

For example, although many active SEO’s say that the H1 heading tag is very important, data correlation suggests that it is far less important than is commonly believed.There are plenty of websites ranking very well for target keyterms and they are not making much use of the H1.

Contrastingly, the page title tag remains all-important. And keyword placement within the title tag is also very important with words closer to the start of the title having more significance.

Another point made by both correlation and feedback from SEO experts is that onpage keyword density is not as important as many believe. It is noted that offsite, inbound linking factors carry far more weight than onsite factors such as keyword density.

Some estimate the relative split in importance to be around 70% applies to inbound link related factors and around 30% relates to onsite factors, including domain age. This clearly demonstrates the importance of inbound links.