If you're a frequent user of WebProWorld, then you might be keeping up with SMX Advanced. If you're someone who's constantly looking for advice on SEO, then finding videos and article about SMX Advanced is a good starting point.

Besides providing you a good starting point for SEO research, I mentioned SMX Advanced for another reason. There's a video that has been released over at WebProNews that piqued my interest. If you want to view it in its entirety, here you go. In the video, Mike McDonald talks with Rand Fishkin of SEOmox about important ranking factors in SEO.

Most of what Rand Fishkin talks about isn't too surprising. Ranking factors you should be looking at are title tags, anchor text, and of course your inbound links. There were a couple of surprises to be found. Most important to me is the declining relevance of onsite content. Also, Fishkin's remarks regarding social media.

Fishkin discussed how the importance of your site's base content isn't quite as valuable as it once was. Meaning your keyword density, and the physical words themselves are effecting your ranking less and less. It's of course still important to have valid content, but not for the SEO reasons and more so for having people link to you. Rishkin mentions that social is becoming a key factor for driving traffic to your site, but says it's hard to actually track its performance. I'd like to think that having a sense of the community you have coming to your site from your social venues is a good barometer.

I'm still torn between the content/links debate. I'd really like to think that content should be what drives links to a site, but sometimes the system does have some kinks. There's of course link hoarders who you can tell don't care about their content. Yet, they'll contact anyone and everyone they can to get those ever-elusive inbound links. Oh well, perhaps a better system is out there in the mind of a Google, Yahoo, or Bing employee.

The ideas presented in the WebProWorld newsletter editor's note do not reflect the thoughts, and ideas of the WebProWorld community.

| JohnnyV |