Inspired by Seomoz Whiteboard Friday, I decided to create my new graph of what i think are the main Google ranking factors and its distribution in order of importance. Be free to chip in and add the debate.

Google Ranking Factors Distribution Graph

Unless you have been hiding under a rock or you have been making extra money in the stock market and got a fat bonus and retired to the Bahamas, as an SEO you might have heard about Google rolling out an algorithmic change based on personalized search.

There has been lots of articles around the topic, explaining how this algo update would work and what impact it would have on SERPs, but what does all this mean for us as SEOs?

SEO for personalized search

Now it has been solved but it was funny to see Google New Zealand to rank first for “Google Ireland” for a couple of weeks and “google.ie”. Even Bing got it wrong.

We have to admit it was a difficult query : )

Video optimisation for inclusion in Universal Search is one of the most unknown topics in the SEO field. We know that if we optimise our video properly, the video gets watched by a reasonable amount of people and is rated and commented, we might have the chance of ranking for blended results in SERPs, but that is as far as our knowledge reaches.

Video SEO optimisaton

As an SEO you read about Link Bait day in and day out. Everything very interesting but you can only digest a limited number of Link Bait definitions or top 10 lists examples as link bait. Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to enjoy a top 10 list but I can count with the fingers of my amputated limb the times that I have linked to any.

For me, Link Bait real ideas are the ones that show some creativity. The economic issue is always there and probably is much easier to write a controversial post insulting someone to spark an argument or invent a story altogether, but what I enjoy as an Internet user, and I really link to, it is useful and funny stuff, most of the times in the shape of a video, software or funny web application.

So from that point of view there you have my favourite Link Bait attempts of all time:

• Compare the Meerkat . The Link Bait spin-off site par excellence. Alexander and his compare the meerkat site has reaped the benefits of a TV campaign too but it quickly went so viral that the spoof site has the same PageRank than Compare the Market but with 11 years less of existence. Fantastic, humorous, funny and effective…as well as useless. But that is not the point.
• Will it Blend. Video related link bait also in a additional site. There is a dilemma whether the subject or your link bait should be hosted in the main site or in a standalone microsite. Succesful attempts seem to point to the latter like these series of videos from Blendtec trying to use their blending machines to destroy all sorts of stuff. This started as a Youtube channel and has evolved to a microsite.
• Doodlebox. This is a great online tool, funny as hell and on topic. Hotels.com has created this online tool so you can scribble around with uploaded pictures and mess around with your friends facial hair or vision impairment levels . Appealing to the primary school student that is within all of us , Doodlebox is a funny way to spend a few minutes and share your “art” with your mates. Flash applications are not the most SEO friendly thing in the world but who cares when the result is so cool. We will have to see how that evolves in terms of links but it is certainly worth sharing.

My contribution is quite cool

• Twitter Grader. When you combine and up and rising start-up in every body’s mouths and a tool that rates “popularity” online the results in terms of buzz and links are bound to come. I am particularly fond of anything that Hubspot do as I find them to be a bunch of cool guys doing the marketing that makes me want to learn more about (as opposed to the kind of marketing that is based on deceiving people). I am not a marketer per se, I am an web developer in background and a SEO for trade, but tools like this make me more accepting of the idea of marketing.

What are your favourite Link bait examples?

Oscar Carreras speaks about Social Media Optimisation in the International Search Summit.

Social media optimisation was the big topic of the last year in the industry, and at the moment agencies are trying to build a business model around it. Most of them are going down the consultancy path plus offering specific services in the way of building widgets or Facebook applications to boost viral campaigns. Most of them are struggling to give value out of it and most companies marketing departments are still reticent to invest money on not so tangible services.

The erroneous way to approach Social Media services, advocated by some other agencies, it is the pay per profile, pay per automatic tools to be present in social networks or per tweets/Facebook friends/Linkedin contacts, etc. This approach is the equivalent of blog comment spam or automated link requests and goes against the intrinsic nature of social media which is based in engaging in the conversation.

More on International Social Media Optimisation

Link analysis is one of the most important areas of search engines ranking algorithms. Although some international search engines are less sophisticated in the way they assess link relevance, there is no reason to believe that these engines, such as Baidu or Yandex, will apply similar more advanced link quality indicators as part or the usual improvement on information retrieval techniques, in a similar way that more developed search companies have evolved, mainly Google.

Relying on link quality indicators has the advantage for search engines to avoid the “noise” and improve results relevancy for specific queries. This is due to the complexity of manipulating a link profile, which can be done, but it is much more onerous and time consuming.

More on Link Analysis for multilingual seo

There are tons of articles on the net about meta tags optimisation best practices and the concepts have been repeated ad nauseam. In a Google centric world as Internet market is,  a westernised approach is usually taken, overlooking the algorithmic or linguistic differences of optimising for other languages/search engines in countries where Google hasn’t got the lead in share market. Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia or Yahoo Japan are examples of search engines where meta tags optimisation guidelines are tailored to the linguistic and cultural characteristics of those respective countries. More on International Search Engines meta tags optimisation best practices

Spanish media association On, accused the official Spanish online ratings bureau(Oficina de la Justificación de Difusión (OJD)) and also Nielsen,  alleged “irregularities” in the way Internet audience is measured in Spain. As a result of the recent published data about Internet ratings in Spain, a couple of very big offline publishers came up on top of the list (Elmundo.es s and Marca.com) which sparked controversy and opened up the debate about what methodology should be used to create the ratings.

More about Spanish Internet ratings and social media