Richard Buettner Internet Consultant

SEOmoz’s recently launched it’s biennial search engine ranking factors survey for 2009.

This report reflects the collective wisdom of experts and if you’re in the SEO area it is certainly one of the most useful resources, providing transparency into what matters for best white hat practices in search engine optimization.

Before proceeding to the results, all it basically says is:

• Write unique, compelling content
• Get a blog
• Write descriptive titles

In a more technically elaborative way this translates to:

The Top 5 most important factors were:

1. Keyword focus in anchor text of external links
2. External link popularity
3. Diversity of link sources
4. Keyword usage in title tags
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain based on Link distance from Trusted domain.

The top 5 Black hat SEO tactics to avoid are:

1. Cloaking with Malicious/Manipulative intent
2. Link acquisition from known link brokers
3. Outbound links to web spam sites/pages
4. Cloaking by User Agent
5. Frequent Server Downtime & Site Inaccessibility

In SEO some factors can sit in the grey area, and here’s the Top 5 contentious factors:

1. Cloaking by cookie detection
2. Cloaking by javascript/rich media support detection
3. Hiding text with same/similar colored text to background
4. Cloaking by IP address
5. Cloaking by user agent.

Find here the full SEOmoz’s Biennial Ranking Factors 2009 report.

If you’re interested in search engine ranking of your own site or search engine optimisation marketing as part of you internet marketing strategy feel free to have a look at my seo services offered.

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