The SMX Advanced 2009 Conference has been running in Seattle this week.
Ok. Ok. I didn’t make it to the conference. I was down here in little ‘ol Springfield, Oregon working away. But due to the wonders of social media I was able to at least get a pretty immediate glimpse of the action.
This blog post, from the folks over at AimClear: “Is Everything you know about SEO Wrong?“ intrigued me. The post covers a session that included several of the top-guns in the SEO biz giving their takes on the current state of SEO.
Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz led off by looking at the traditional list of SEO ranking factors and how the mix is evolving. You can see the SEO Factor List we are currently tracking. According to the SMX Advanced session it looks like the ingredients might not really be changing too much but the recipe has been tweaked quite a bit.
Some interesting highlights:
(Note: Rand was making his statements based on a survey SEOMOZ recently sent out to 100 top SEOs.)
1. Seems SEOs are saying H1 tags are not nearly as important as they used to be. Maybe the Engines have perceived them as the next fertile ground for abuse, after meta keywords, which are now summarily ignored.
2. Significance of keywords in the domain/sub-domain appears to be on the rise. I agree.
3. As many other news reports have been indicating lately, Google Toolbar page rank is a poor indicator of just about anything. It looks pretty. Not worth much.
4. There is quite a bit of importance to the somewhat nebulous non-link factors, such as freshness and uniqueness of content. Create great content, folks, and you will be rewarded. There is nothing surprising about the need for good content. But over time, the importance of fresh, relevant content seems to be growing.
5. With incoming links, Domain Trust is a biggy. No surprise there. The up-and-coming factors – particularly in regard to social media exposure and the authority that you derive from that, in SEO terms, is still sketchy.
The session went on with presentations by AimClear’s Marty Weintraub and Yahoo’s (yes, they still exist) Laura Lippay. I recommend checking out the entire post over at AimClear’s blog. It is a good read.
