USA SEO Pros: Reporting Industry News

It’s a joy to be in the changing industry of SEO, and it was very refreshing to see what was going on during the second day of the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced conference. We also covering the first day of SMX yesterday.

At the conference, they covered many things that are good to keep in mind, and touched on good habits that everyone should keep in mind when working on Web sites. There were two things that I got the most joy out of reading, the first was how to better add flash in to a site and not lose out on all the rankings. I am someone that enjoys the look and feel of a good flash site and likes adding audio and video, and I like to learn new things that will allow me to do this and not lose rankings. To add to it, most major search engines are also working hard to index sites that are composed mostly of flash. In my mind this just makes for an all around better web experience, but it is still far from being perfect and not for every site.

The other interesting thing covered at SMX was conducting an SEO Audit and the many sides to consider in doing so. The presentation was very well laid out and gave many tips to consider when performing an audit on a site. Some of the tips included looking at URLs, site navigation and site latency. There is also a great list of tools that were talked about that can help you in your quest of making the most search friendly pages. I would have to say that the key to having a good audit is being able to keep proper track of problems and what actions you tried to do to correct the problem. This will let you see over time what has worked and what effect everything had. Sometimes it will not just be one thing keeping you from getting high rankings, but it will be a few small factors working together that have a negative effect on the site you are working on.

I think that every SEO tech out there can take a little comfort in knowing that most true techs out there are dealing with the same issues. This conference shows just how true that is. I would say if you have been in the business for years or are just starting out, reading the articles at searchmarketingexpo.com are well worth the time. I know I have enjoyed the experience and can’t wait to see what others have to say about it.

With the first day of SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Advanced passing, there were a few things that were of interest from an SEO point of view. The “SEO Ranking Factors In 2009” was one of these things. A lot of what we already know still holds true and other SMX events like the one in London covered some of the information, but there were some tweaks to how search engine giant Google is going to be looking at things. There is a lot of speculation into Google’s future algorithm concerning links: 47 percent of people believe that the importance of links will decline while of course, still retaining at least some importance.

The URL, Title and Alt text came up as the most important on-page factors according to Rand Fishkin. Images having alt text are not only better for page validation, but seem to have a correlation with high rankings. In their words though, “Correlation is NOT causation,” which is important to note. Personally, I find it funny that Outspoken Media has this bit of information on their site, and fails validation through W3C’s Validation Markup Service for not having alt text in their images. Even a blank alt text would have gotten them out of that pinch.

A bit of information that may interest people is the data from SEOmoz concerning their view of Google’s algorithm:

• Trust authority of host domain - 25 percent
• Link population of specific page - 22 percent
• Anchor text of external links - 20 percent
• On page keyword use - 15 percent
• Traffic and CTR data - 7 percent
• Social graph metrics - 6 percent
• Hosting and registration - 5 percent

What concerns me the most is trust authority of host domain. For those just getting into setting up their own site with the hope of getting on page one of Google, this list of just how trustworthy a host domain is definitely not readily accessible. Setting these hosting providers up with a numerical value seems like it would be something Google would just sell to the highest bidder. Those in the know of numerical values would abuse it, setting up where the authority was highest. Godaddy is likely on the list of one of the higher providers since they’re mainstream enough to have sponsored NASCAR.

Another bit of information that is sure to hurt a lot of sites out there such as Squidoo is the possibility that Google may change their Nofollow algorithm. SELand broke it down very simply:

“…if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”

The sculpting that sites do to give more authority to certain things rather than others is going to lose effect. Making site owners modify their sites accordingly without sculpting, since it won’t hold as much weight.

On a final note, it seems that MSN’s new project Bing is sponsoring two of the time blocks for SMX. A small pittance for the trouble to have caused many over the personal and business tracking of ranks over keywords. Looking at Bing, it doesn’t seem any different from MSN’s old design when it came down to the submission.

Here’s a funny side note: When I had first heard of Bing, typing bing.com directly into the URL bar brought up nothing. But searching for Bing on Google and clicking on their link made it work. Good job Bing.

Not much video has been released from SMX Advanced 2009 yet, but there are other videos like this one with Matt Cutts from SMX events earlier in the year.

The SMX (Search Marketing Expo) has already made its stop in London this year, and some interesting tips were brought up during the event. There have been several posts that list some of the more helpful tips that were discussed, and we’ll summarize some of those in this post. USASEOPros already does most of these things, but a lot of people seem to be behind the times. It’s important to keep on top of the SEO community, or it’ll leave you behind pretty quickly.

One of the posts about SMX London is a list of quotes from the event and it can definitely be helpful for marketers and SEOs. Most of these quotes come from two people who really seem to know what they’re talking about when it comes to SEO: Rand Fishkin (from the SEO authority SEOmoz) and Patrick Altoft (from Branded3). They both had some very interesting (and sometimes obvious) things to say that people should think about.

One of my favorite quotes from Rand is, “Alexa data is slightly better than random guessing.” This has always seemed to be the case, but for some reason a lot of people still believe that Alexa is an authoritative source for data that they don’t actually produce. One of the more obvious, but still little-known facts that Rand covered was that Google devalues links in sidebars and footers. If you want a link to have power, make sure to put it in the main body.

Patrick had some good things to say at the event as well, and one of the quotes that stuck out to me in the article was, “It doesn’t matter if a link is paid for or not. Important is if the end product looks like a paid link or not.” The debate between whether or not buying links is kosher has been argued for a while, and this is an interesting outlook on the situation. While Patrick obviously doesn’t mind buying links, he brings up a good point: make sure they don’t obviously look like they’ve been bought if you do decide to go that route.

A different blog post includes an attendee’s notes that he wrote up after going to the event. The post lists 41 tips that he heard while listening to presentations, and there’s some good stuff in there. Some of the better tips in the list include paying attention how your competitor’s site is set up for SEO, and also optimizing for popular misspellings (but make sure to do this in a professional way.

For an Internet marketing, the SMX events can be a great benefit to your profession. The events happen all across the globe, so when you’re unable to attend one, it’s great to see that other people are willing to spread the knowledge like the creators of the above two posts do.