At this year’s SMX meeting in June, bigshots of the SEO kingdom got together and discussed the latest in SEO, the big search engines, the algorithms, strategies, and the surprising results they’ve gathered over the past year.
This year’s triad of knowledge included Marianne Sweeny of Portent, Matthew Brown of Moz, and Marcus Tober of Searchmetrics inc.
The analysis of what ranks and doesn’t came as a surprise in many cases and the old standards kept their ground as well according to the report at Search Engine Land.
One of the things that popped up and is a rising talk of the town is the power of brand names. This is all abuzz amongst internet marketers because achieving brand name status means an easier road to marketing and capital. People either know who you are, respect you, or they don’t. Rankings seemed higher for certain brands even new ones. It’s also part of not a singular thing that makes the rankings higher with brand names. That includes links, backlinks, social media, etc.. The bottom line here is it’s better to have a brand than not.
Internal links and good content still win the day although one must be cautious about how many and how good those internal links are. Good content continues to win the day and writers who specialize in great copy can mean the difference between success and failure. Remember, people will visit a site and if they can’t understand what is going on they won’t search, bookmark, or share. It’s imperative that internal links go to relevant pages and those pages have content that is far better than good.
Other such common sense factors as site speed are important as well. If your site loads too slow you’re losing out big time. Those timeouts mean no surfers, spiders, crawlers, etc.. You need to be on top of what your hosting company is doing and make sure they are up to speed.
Other tidbits in the search metrics focused on fine tuned things such as mentioned earlier but in-depth regarding the connection to well done optimization and poorly done. Keywords strategically and well placed enhance things for the better. Good content, speed, the works.
If all this seems common sense it is because it is. The days of sloppy, cheap content coming from hack mills are coming to a close and soon billions of websites will drop off the radar as a greater emphasis on quality emerges.
It’s ironic how the experts are finding that Google and other top social sites can drop in ranking and then upon analysis find out that it’s all about quality. People know quality and the emerging domination of mobile is showing that. People just don’t have time for schlock content. It’s their valuable time and money at stake and if a site reaches top rankings but delivers sucker content only because they know the tricks of black hat SEO then the end up taking a beating they’ll never recover from.