Difficult metrics to manipulate effectively with high correlation to trust, importance
Top Tips for SEOs (From SEOmoz)
Based on the work we do crawling and building an index, and the struggles we’ve encountered (and seen the engines similarly encounter), we’ve crafted a few short tips. While some of these are obvious and well known, they still pay to keep in mind as high-level recommendations we feel confident the search engines would support:
- Don’t rely on the search engine to canonicalize anything for you.
- Focus on link acquisition from a diverse number of root domains, not necessarily high PageRank pages, or those with high link counts.
- Make smart, usable, short URLs. They’re far easier to process and have a much better correlation with useful, unique content an engine would want to keep in its index.
- If you want to earn lots of links, building a distributed content widget/badge/link that users embed in their sites/pages is an incredibly effective strategy. Just look at how many of the top pages on the web achieved that position employing this strategy.
- Don’t rely on PageRank or raw link counts as accurate assessments of ranking potential. According to our data, they’re not high signal or high rankings correlation metrics.
- The social web is rising, as are those employing it effectively (again, check out the top sites list for evidence).
- Don’t be afraid to use nofollow internally as it’s clearly not an outlier on the web. However, do be cautious with its use – you can seriously screw things up if you make mistakes on that front.
- Keep content on a single subdomain and root domain wherever possible. The metrics of that domain will go a long way to make that content visible and ranking-worthy.
- Avoid doing “strange” things from a technical and link acquisition perspective. The former makes you harder to crawl, process and index while the latter makes you stand out as possible spam/manipulation.