SEO trends in search engine ranking factors and signals are covered by SEOmom/Gillian Muessig of SEOmoz at Search Congress Barcelona 2011.

1. State of SearchWhere We Are, Where We’re Headedand How to Win Gillian MuessigPresident & Co-Founder, SEOmoz

2. “Essentially, we've been doing the same kind of search now for over a decade, right? It's basically anchor text and PageRank and inbound links, and that's how we've kind of decided what page is best for a particular term… But there are signals beyond this.” Stefan Weitz, Director for Bing Search http://www.seomoz.org/blog/director-of-bing-discusses-holistic-search-and-clickstream-data-whiteboard-friday

3. “One piece of advice I give to SEO masters is, don’t chase after Google’s algorithm, chase after your best interpretation of what users want, because that’s what Google’s chasing after,” Matt Cutts, Head of Web Spam, Google http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

4. Every 3-4 years, there's a big shift or addition to the key metrics Google (and, to a lesser extent MSN/Bing and Yahoo!) uses to order competitive search results. 1996-1999: On-page keyword usage + meta data 1999 - 2002: PageRank + On-page 2002 - 2005: Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page 2005 - 2009: Domain authority + Diversity of linking domains + Topic modeling + Anchor text + Domain name + PageRank + On-Page Rand Fishkin, the Wizard of Moz http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

5. Ranking Correlations Signals Today

6. Negative Correlations URL Length .com TLD extension http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

7. Query Matching in Domain Name Contains All Query Terms in Domain Name Exact MatchHyphenated Domain Exact Match Domain http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

8. Exact Match Domains by TLD Extension Exact Match .org Exact Match .net Exact Match .com Exact Match http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

9. Keywords in Domain All Keywords inSubdomain Exact Match .* http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

10. On Page Keyword Usage KWs in Body KWs in Alt Attribute KWs in H1 Tag KWs in URL KWs in Title http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

11. TLD Extensions .gov .edu .info .net .org .com http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

12. Length of Domain, URL & Content Content Length(tokens in body) URL Length(chars) Domain NameLength (chars) http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

13. Website Home Pages Exact Match Domain Home Page of Site http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

14. Features w/Highest Correlation Number of Links Exact Match Domain # of LinkingRoot Domains Domains Linkingw/Exact Match Exact Match.com Domains http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

15. Link Attribute Correlations Today

16. Diversity of Domains + Linking C-Blocks # of Linking Root Domains to URL # of Links to URL http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

17. Anchor Text # of Links w/ exact match anchor text # of linking root domains w/ exact match anchor text http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html

18. Features of Linking Pages http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

19. Features of Linking Domains http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html Data via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

20. Topic Modeling

21. Topic Modeling Topic models provide a simple way to analyze large volumes of unlabeled text.

22. Topic Modeling A "topic" consists of a cluster of words that frequently occur together. http://neoformix.com/archive.html

23. Using contextual clues, topic models can connect words with similar meanings and distinguish between uses of words with multiple meanings. http://www.stanford.edu/~kaisa/research.html

25. Why Engines Need Topic Modeling

26. Term Frequency & Inverse Document Frequency

27. Co-Occurence

28. Topic Modeling

29. Content-related signals require the ability to determine INTENT Rock or baseball? Are you SURE?

31. If Your Response Is…

32. Simplistic Term Vector Model

33. Correlation Is Strong

34. Correlation Is Strong Standard Deviation

35. Causation? Not So Fast! Perhaps, good links are more likely to point to pages that are more "relevant" via a topic model or some other aspect of Google's algorithm that we don't yet understand naturally biases towards these.

36. LDA Tool in the Labs URL input box

39. Compare Your Friends

41. We have built a tool to help grade & improve page content

43. Social Signals Page A 646 links from 36 root domains 2 tweets Page B 1 link from 1 root domain 522 tweets http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

44. Social Signals Page B – the tweeted version – ranks #1! Page A 646 links from 36 root domains 2 tweets Page B 1 link from 1 root domain 522 tweets http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-tweets-influence-search-rankings-an-experiment-for-a-cause

45. Social Signals http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study

46. Social Signals http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-case-study#jtc133590

47. Author Authority Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are? Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan) Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life :-) http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

49. Have authentic, followed social accounts

50. Display obvious, robust contact information

51. Register with government/civic organizations

52. Receive traffic from diverse sources

53. Generate branded search query volume

54. Run offline marketing/advertising campaigns

55. Often exist only online

56. Rarely have significant social accounts

57. Frequently use email forms only

58. Stay “under the radar”

59. Search is often 90%+ of traffic

60. Have little-no branded search demand

61. Ignore the offline worldhttp:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals

62. Domain Name / Brand Name “Mentions” http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape

63. Depreciation/Filtering of Anchor Text http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-recommendation-for-googles-webspam-team

64. Some Future-Looking Link Building Tactics I Love

65. Q+A Sites http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/question_and_answer_sites.php

66. Building Your Own Social Community http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://mashable.com/2010/11/15/biggest-facebook-brands/

67. Media Coverage http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

68. Comment Marketing http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy

69. Competitive Analysis of Top “Brands” Where do these brands earn their links? http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

70. Investigating Brand “Mention” Sources Facebook page Blippr? Crunchbase profile App profile on Blackberry Twitter account BusinessWeek Profile Chrome Extension Mashable Article

72. Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog

73. Email: gillian@seomoz.orgYou can now try SEOmoz PRO Free! http://www.seomoz.org/freetrial