Jan 15 2007
ShoeMoney

What Are The Most Important SEO Aspects

31 people have said their piece on this post. What say you?
Most Important Seo Factor
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So it seems that I stirred up a little storm last week with my post with my opinion on SEO stuff… So what do you think is most important? Its our question of the week for Jan 15th!

  1. LikeButta said on January 15th, 2007 at 8:19 pm

    You don’t have it listed by for this list I’d reckon title tag as long as on page isn’t unreasonable (i.e. output via javascript). External links are obviously #1 and yes that is SEO. Also internal linking is up there as well.

  2. Aaron Nimocks said on January 15th, 2007 at 8:40 pm

    Thats a tricky question. Its a toss up between onpage and title tags though.

    If you consider onpage optimization including content then that is the definite winner.

  3. Hoo said on January 15th, 2007 at 8:47 pm

    There should be a option of “I don’t have a clue.”

  4. Tom said on January 15th, 2007 at 9:03 pm

    I agree 100% with Aaron. Title tags are very important, but the most important factor is the content itself, which I would say falls under on page optimization.

  5. jim said on January 15th, 2007 at 9:26 pm

    I saw gray wolf’s blog got hacked by a dude named FuckingPirate and he listed you as a future target. Is this for real?

  6. Tyler Banfield said on January 15th, 2007 at 9:29 pm

    Anchor text in external links?

  7. Ian McAnerin said on January 15th, 2007 at 9:41 pm

    The problem with choosing an option is that it isn’t about the code, it’s about confidence. it’s possible to have a page with more than one topic or to have words on it that may give a search engine a different idea about your topic than it really is. Many people who have made Adsense pages has seen this type of behavior - where totally wrong ads show up because Google didn’t understand the topic of the page properly.
    On the other hand, it’s less likely that you will have misleading content in your title and header tags - they generally reference the topic of the page. Therefore, a search engine tends to place more value on them. But it doesn’t have to (some titles are misleading, too)

    If you have a page called blue-frog.htm, and the title of the page is “blue frog breeding” and the headers all talk about blue frogs related topics, then even if the content hardly mentions blue frogs, a search engine is more likely to trust that the page is actually about blue frogs. Likewise, if you have meaningless titles and headers, then the content will be where the search engine looks, though it may not be as confident in it’s assumptions, because now it’s guessing.
    So I guess my answer would be the title tag, but only barely.

  8. James Dunn said on January 15th, 2007 at 10:08 pm

    I agree with Tyler, anchor text in external links from trusted, related sites are probably the biggest factor in SEO. On-page SEO only plays out when none of your competitors have very good off-page SEO.

  9. Hoo Money said on January 16th, 2007 at 2:09 am

    The title of this pose might be misnamed. Looks like you got everything except links, which is like > 80% of SEO ranking factor. Did you mean “Non link based SEO” or “On page SEO”?

  10. Dean said on January 16th, 2007 at 2:29 am

    Hey Shoemoney, this is a little off topic but could you recommend to me your web host. I have a blog and wordpress is bogging down on my current host.

  11. Mikkel deMib Svendsen said on January 16th, 2007 at 3:26 am

    The problem with the question is, that the answer depends on the site and the market. Also, I don’t really care what is most important but rather what it takes to rank well in any specific case.

  12. Scott Weaver said on January 16th, 2007 at 3:57 am

    How funny. Does the title really have that much weight in the matter? I always thought it was SEO and page content.

  13. kelvin newman said on January 16th, 2007 at 5:21 am

    It’s a heady brew and mixture, I don’t think anyone individually is the be all and end all its doing okay in all that’s the trick.

  14. Vygantas said on January 16th, 2007 at 5:28 am

    It really depends on search engine, you know that :-)
    As from mine experience, Yahoo puts more atention on domain that Google or Live (ok, ok… MSN Search). So I’ve voted for this one.

    Regards,

  15. Stefan Juhl said on January 16th, 2007 at 6:00 am

    Maybe you should’ve mentioned which search engine the SEO’ing is for…

  16. ukgimp said on January 16th, 2007 at 7:53 am

    There is no clear cut answer on this. Together they can kick ass, but you cant always get certain aspects, namely the domain.

    Also what about factors like you have the domain but no links, in that case you are going nowhere chief!

    You need them all ideally, so i cant vote as it says you must pick one :-)

  17. Zune (GeorgeB) said on January 16th, 2007 at 8:04 am

    So yeah you kinda left out the anchor text on inbound links option :)

  18. John Loch said on January 16th, 2007 at 9:07 am

    You forgot the ‘Blackhat’ option..

    Hehe :D

  19. Brian Turner said on January 16th, 2007 at 9:49 am

    I’m not seeing links as an option.

    IMO SEO is two main areas:

    1. On page optimisation
    2. Link development

    The best performers have both of the above, IMO.

  20. Shortshire said on January 16th, 2007 at 11:11 am

    SEO is a complex because it matters on the search engine. As for my vote I chose on page SEO which in my mind does include content for some reason. Content is still king and the queen are the back links.

  21. Mike Peters said on January 16th, 2007 at 12:22 pm

    None of the above.

    Case in point - search for “robots” on google. First spot is http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/ - the Hollywood movie. No onpage seo, no keyword in title/url (but 170 .gov links and 54,700 [yes] .edu links)

    The most important SEO factor is trust.

    Similar to the real world, you can gain trust online in an honest way (whitehat, linkbait, press releases, articles) and you can take shortcuts (blackhat, grayhat). Ultimately it all boils down to trust.

  22. VaBeachKevin said on January 16th, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    In my opinion it has to be keyword in the domain. Currently I feel that inbound link anchor text is king (miserable failure, etc), and a lot of the time you will get people linking to you using your domain name as the anchor text as opposed to the specific anchor text keywords you want.

  23. Tyler Banfield said on January 16th, 2007 at 1:00 pm

    Look at his Recs page for the answer

  24. Todd said on January 16th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

    Age and trust

  25. Clint Lenard said on January 17th, 2007 at 11:51 am

    Keyword in Title tag, without a doubt.

  26. Marko said on January 17th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

    It all plays a role so stuff those keywords!!!

  27. bdmunee said on January 17th, 2007 at 10:41 pm

    Referrer, trackback and comment spam, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, social networking exploits, cloaking, B & P, etc.

  28. Dave said on January 18th, 2007 at 3:46 pm

    there is no option for spam

  29. John Loch said on January 19th, 2007 at 12:19 am

    Well then, lets see if your poll has paid off.. or if your tweak to your own title tags makes a difference..

    I see you shakin that $ !!

  30. [...] Onpage SEO 6926% of all votes [...]

  31. [...] Scopro grazie al blog di Nicola Riva che su shoemoney è stato pubblicato un sondaggio attraverso il quale è possibile scegliere quali sono, a giudizio dei lettori, i principali fattori per il posizionamento nei motori di ricerca. Gli autori hanno messo a disposizione quattro risposte; fattori onpage seo, keyword nel dominio, keyword nel tag title, keyword in url. Le prime risposte sono state in linea di massima scontate, a farla da padrone è il tag title con quasi il 50% delle preferenze; però nel sondaggio a mio avviso, e come giustamente sottolineato da Nicola, mancano alcuni fattori, tutti riconducibili a un denominatore comune, i fattori off page. [...]