That title just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Well, this is actually a post about two other posts.  I’ll bet you can guess what they’re about if you look at the title again.

Don’t worry about it – you don’t have to guess.

Rand Fishkin, of SEOmoz fame, conducts a survey every two years to create a killer SEO resource.  So, that’s what he did this year (2011).

He collected opinions from 132 SEO’s around the world and combined their opinions with data from over 10,000 Google search results.  The end result is a really awesome resource that can help sharpen your SEO skills.

Here are a few of the highlights.

Most Important Page-Level Link Factors:

• Linking root domains with exact anchor text.
• Linking root domains with partial anchor text.
• Linking root domains.
• Links with exact anchor text.
• Links with partial anchor text.
• Pagerank and mozRank.
• Topical relevance of links.

Most Important Domain-Level Link Factors:

• Linking root domains to domain.
• Domain-level PageRank.
• Domain-level TrustRank.
• Total # of links to domain.
• Relevance of linking root domains to domain.
• Velocity of link acquisition.

Most Important On-Page Use of Keywords:

• Title tag.
• First words of title.
• Internal Anchor links.
• The url.
• H1 headline.
• External anchor links.
• In body content.
• First 100 words.

Most Important Social Media-Based Factors:

• Authority of tweets.
• Number of tweets.
• Number of Facebook shares.
• Authority of sharers.
• Up votes on Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon.

Possible Future Trends:

• Social signals will become more important.
• Perceived value to users will be more important.
• Usage data will be more important (e.g., bounce rate, CTR)
• Exact match domains will be less important.

A Few Interesting Takeaways:

• Nofollow links can help with ranking.
• Longer documents tend to rank better.
• Long titles/url’s are bad for SEO.
• Using keywords early in tags or on page can help with ranking.
• Top 5 TLD’s .com, .org, .net, .gov, .edu.
• The importance of exact match domains have decreased.

These are just a few items picked from the report.  Check out the whole report here – Search Ranking Factors.

Social Media Ranking Signals

In his report, Rand included a link to an article on social signals.

The link directed to a great article on Danny Sullivan’s site, Search Engine Land.

The article is basically about six questions that Danny submitted to Google and Bing about social signals and how they impact their search engine rankings.

The article was published in December 2010 but social media factors are only becoming more important, not only as a way to be social, but as a ranking factor for search engines.

Obviously, it’s important from an SEO perspective to understand if links carry any ranking weight, if “authority” matters on Twitter or Facebook, if Facebook “likes” help with ranking and so on and so forth.

I won’t give you any summaries on this one because it’s pretty self-explanatory if you check out the article – Social Signals.

Both are definitely worth reading.