SEO Ranking Factors in 2009

“The best ranking factor you can have is a hot product.”

I was sent a fantastic overview of today’s SEO environment - this is worth the read!  http://www.aimclearblog.com/2009/06/04/is-everything-you-know-about-seo-wrong/, posted by Matt Peterson, is a summary of “SEO Ranking Factors in 2009” at SMX Advanced 2009.

You shouldn’t miss this section:
“Sad facts of SEO Life: You can’t slay a dragon with a slingshot. That is, you can’t rank for “Las Vegas Hotels” with your new blogspot domain. Mediocre SEO’s make the mistake of using keywords based solely on search frequency and then wonder why their site is sucking in the SERPs.

The internet is sooooo competitive, you need to understand attainability as a critical SEO ranking factor. Still, attainable doesn’t matter if nobody cares.

Attainability & search frequency should be used in tandem; attainability doesn’t really mean anything without frequency.”

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“The more competitors you have, the less you should rely on traditional SEO tactics and more on creating a buzz-worthy product in order to rank well. Testing the relationships between high ranking and hot products, does a good product = good SEO?

Yahoo! did consumer surveys to compare their products against competitors. They compared top mindshare vs top search ranking across several topics. For the topic of sports, the top 3 companies in surveyed consumer mindshare correlated directly with Yahoo’s top search rankings. With finance, they correlated although ordered differently, the same things were observed when comparing top movie sites.

What does this all have to do with ranking factors again? SEO is not a band aid for a run of the mill product; think about strategy, look at what your competitors are doing, how can you build something that will outrank your competitors?

You can’t forget the big picture, the best ranking factor you can have is a hot product. Make the product manager and other big people your best friends (buy them beer). Ask yourself questions about strategy before working on SEO.”