For the last year I've been spending my free time after
school conducting Red Bull-fueled coding sessions in the pursuit of one single
goal: to bring more science to the SEO industry.
As an industry we are still only taking our first few baby
steps into the world of maths, stats, and data-driven decisions. For a
seemingly data-dependent industry, SEO professionals are influenced to a
surprising degree by rumor, anecdotal evidence, and unscientific tests.
SEOMoz were the true visionaries in conducting correlation
studies to analyze search engine algorithms. With my project, I hoped to take
it that little bit further and analyze more factors on a larger dataset.
After analyzing the top 100 search results for over 10,000
keywords I had gathered 180,000,000 (one hundred and eighty million) data
points on 186 potential factors in the Google algorithm. This has lead to the
most comprehensive published research into Google's algorithm, and some pretty
incredible findings.
With so much data and so many findings it would be
impossible to go through them all here so in this post, I have hand-picked all
the most important findings for readers.
Correlations are a useful but imperfect indicator of the
relationship between two pieces of data, in this case search engine ranking and
the factor being tested. They range from -1 to 1, a minus number meaning the
factor correlates with a negative impact on ranking, and a positive number
meaning ranking and the magnitude of the factor move in the same direction.
How close the correlation is to either of the 1%u2032s is an
indicator of its importance/strength. A 0.7 correlation is very strong whereas
a 0.05 correlation implies almost no relationship between the two variables.
For example, correlation studies have been used to link
income to education. As we all know the more education we have, on average the
more income we earn, but where did that statistic come from and why do most
people believe it?
Correlations are used to prove relationships between two
pieces of data, in this case amount of education and income, and to figure out
how important that relationship is, by putting numbers behind the logic.
Here are some examples;
Participant Income years of study
1 125,000 19
2 100,000 20
3 40,000 16
4 35,000 16
5 41000 18
6 29,000 12
7 35,000 14
8 24,000 12
9 50,000 16
10 60,000 17
In this sample, the correlation is 0.79. Just from looking
at the data, you can see that the more time the study's participants spent in
education, the more income they earned.
This is verified by the correlation which is a positive
number (when education increases, income increases) and is very close to 1.0.
This demonstrates that the relationship between education and income is a
strong one.
My research findings
Now that you understand correlations, let's look at what my
research revealed about SEO.
Finding 1. SEO plugins are not the answer
I'm sure you are aware there are a whole host of WordPress
SEO plugins available for your blog. These plugins tend to deal primarily with
on-page SEO, for example, placing keywords in the URL, title, meta description,
etc.
While some plugins deal with the indexing side of SEO, which
may provide some small SEO benefit, the majority tend to focus their efforts on
these on-page factors.
The truth is that contrary to all the rhetoric of SEOs and
industry "experts" over the last ten years, according to my research
these simplistic have almost no bearing on a page's rank in Google.
That's not to say that Google hasn't developed more advanced
algorithms to analyse content on a page, but certainly the traditional factors
such as keywords being in title tags, h1/h2/h3 tags, etc. can be ignored when
writing blog posts.
The main learning here for readers (bloggers) is that
instead of worrying about search engines when you write your next blog post,
you should focus 100% on the user.
Check out all these articles in common resource on how to
write a great post. Guess what? None of them talk about how users love a title
tag stuffed with keywords or headings tags that are meaningless space-fillers
designed solely for search engine spiders.
Finding 2. You gotta love link building
The only set of factors to have all the signals tested show
a significant positive correlation was links.
Without a doubt, the single most important factor in gaining
search engine ranking is building links to your blog.
Page Authority, an SEOMoz metric that models the PageRank
for a given URL, was by far the most influential factor in the study. What this
means is that it is not only important to build links to your homepage, but
also to the posts you want to get rank well in Google.
When was the last time you wrote a guest post or created a
viral infographic? How much time do you spend doing keyword research or doing
repetitive, mundane tasks like manually optimizing posts for keyword density?
If there is one piece of action everybody who reads this
post should take, it is without a doubt to create a link-building strategy for
your blog.
The proof:
link related correlations
Finding 3. Domains still matter
There's been a lot of scaremongering about exact match
domains of late, but the fact is that Google still highly values EMDs that have
high quality content on them.
That's the key. If you have a blog and you plan to publish
great content that users will love then a EMD can be a massive help in getting
you to #1 for that big keyword.
After seeing this significant positive correlation between
EMDs and ranking #1 in Google, I looked a little deeper at the domain name
market and learnt that there were over 200,000 domains expiring every day.
Bloggers can catch dropping domains before they go back onto
the market and create incredible sites with them, which will have a natural
advantage over the competition. Matt Green wrote a great post about this tactic
right here on Problogger.net.
The proof:
exact match domain correlations
Research in summary
I think the key learnings from all this data for readers can
be summarized into one sentence: "write for your audience not the search
engines, build links to your great content, and develop your blog on a great
domain with incredible domain authority."
Do you focus on SEO? What works to push your site up the
search rankings? Share your thoughts on my research in the comments.