Top SEO Ranking Factors for 2011

SEOmoz today released the industry crowd-sourced SEO ranking factors for 2011. To do this SEOmoz surveyed 134 SEO professionals (including a couple of my close friends) on what which particular factors have the greatest effect on search rankings. SEO professionals are also invited to collate their thoughts on where they think the industry is heading.

2011 SEO Ranking Factors:

Versus 2009′s SEO Ranking Factors:

The key take aways:

Social signals – Yes that word again.
For a while now, SEO’s have hypothesised and experimented with the correlation of Social Media popularity and SEO rankings. It’s no surprise that Social signals are here to stay.

In this years SEO ranking factors we can see that Social Popularity at a page / URL level is given much precedence than back in 2009. This is a direct result of Google & other search engine being able analyse and manipulate publicly accessible Social metrics – such likes, RT’s, reviews & (some) check-ins. Search engines want to know how influential a website is and will also consider if highly influential people agree.

What’s next for SEO?

Most of the professional SEOs believed the analysis of a page or website’s strength towards users would become more important over time, followed by social signals at both page and domain level.

What is interesting is that most of the SEO’s agree’d that keyword rich / stuffed domain names, such as ireallyreallywantorankingforthislongkeyword.com, would loose strength over time – something I definitely welcome.

View the SEOmoz 2011 ranking factors here