September 29, 2005

Rand stresses that exactly what is used and how important is impossible to know. That's crucial to remember. I skimmed his list, and some of the stuff makes a lot of sense that I'd agree with. Have good title tags, absolutely. Have good use of the terms you want to be found for in the body copy.

Other things, I'm not so much in agreement with. I don't think external links are crucial for a page to do well, but that's my view and experience. Keyword use in the URL is a extremely minor factor to me -- I'd give it half a box or even less, if that was an option. He also stresses too much to me the idea about links coming in to your TLD or your root domain.

Search engines by and large still say they are (and seem to be) operating under the notion of looking at pages individually. They don't really seem to try and understand what your entire site is "about," though Yahoo did say about a year ago that having many links at your root domain could help boost your internal pages.

It would be fun to see all the factors listed so that a community of SEOs could rate how important they are deemed to be. Overall, it's fun to look down and certainly will give you plenty to think about. But you'll also realize how difficult it will be to get exactly every piece "right."

In fact, you won't. You'll get many things wrong. So how do you win? I still fall back on making sure you have some of the best content you can offer, built in search engine friendly manner. Build it -- and don't put up search engine barriers -- and for many people the traffic will indeed flow.