Just downloaded the new Bruce Clay SEO Factors and Trends Report which acts as a great reminder of SEO issues we all faced throughout 2009. All in all it’s pretty well written and contains lots of hints at things that can/have been done in SEO over the last 12 months.
Heres a few of the takeaways from this excellent document.
Online Brand Presence
…the number of times a brand is used in conjunction with a keyword on pages…
Adding your brand name as part of your link building effort achieves positive results in google so now is the time to name-drop in blog comments, forum signatures, press releases, social media and articles.
Richer Search Listings
…one line site links, rich snippets, breadcrumbs and geo-location…
They mention using ‘named’ anchors to help achieve ‘one line site links’… I assume this is a turn of phrase and will be investigating whether they actually mean the name=”" attribute or whether they mean consistency of anchor text.
The use of Microfotmats such as hCard, vCard and hReview are encouraged to give more information and pull-out your listings from the crowd.
Folder structure is being used as an alternative to ‘one line site links’ so think folder structure people!
Engagement Objects™
…and will thus reward (rank higher) sites that include appropriate Engagement Objects™.
I have no idea what these are but they sure sound interesting. When I get a moment I will report back with my findings.
Contextual Links
Our research indicates that search engines have added more weight to contextual links and less weighting to links from the navigation, side bars and footer…
Hit articles, blog posts, guest posts, social media and other sources of in-content links to boost your rankings.
So there you have it. Just a few of the excellent points raised in the Bruce Clay document. There’s some new things for me to check out (what a novelty) and I am looking forwards to spending some time evaluating these techniques.
Enjoy.
Awesome info.