MIH SWAT

Every two years, SEOmoz surveys top SEO experts worldwide on their opinions of the algorithmic elements that comprise search engine rankings. This year’s survey features contributors from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Ukraine, the Dominican Republic and many more.

Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. This document, representing the collective wisdom of expert practitioners, is, in my opinion, one of the most useful resources for SEO practitioners of all varieties, helping to provide transparency into what matters (and doesn’t) for best practices in search engine optimization.

The document contains five important sections:

• The Overview – offering the most high level view of the ranking elements
• Complete Rankings Data – ranking factors were rated by SEOmoz’s panel of 72 SEO experts. Their feedback is aggregated and averaged into the percentage scores below. For each, they’ve calculated the degree to which the experts felt this factor was important for achieving high rankings as well as the degree of variance in opinion, estimated using the standard deviation of the contributors’ answers. Thus, factors that are high in importance and low in contention are those where experts most strongly agree that the factor is critical to rankings. It also include some interesting Geo-Targeting data.
• Link Building Tactics- this is where you should start when embarking on link building campaigns.
• Additional SEO Data – insight into critical (and sometimes contentious) debates in the SEO field
• Contributors – Here you can find all the experts consulted during the exercise and also what this valuable data really is to SEOmoz: an enormous link building exercise

Already, there are over 200 links pointing to the SEOmoz article page in under 16 hours.

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