Tanner Hobin

According to Google, Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American.

Read the full story from Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land here.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask recently announced a unified system for sitemap submission. Add the following line of code to your robots.txt file, and your sitemap will be crawled during normal indexing.

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

It is easy for search marketers to get carried away with the enormous number of factors that could have an effect on website rankings. Sometimes we all need to just take a step back and determine what is worth our attention. So you can imagine my delight when I came across this article a week ago.

The article from seomoz.org titled, Search Engine Ranking Factors, provides an importance level for each factor determined by industry leading organic search marketing professionals. Though I’m sure most ethical search marketers have been utilizing these techniques for years, it is still very nice to get solid reinforcement from other professionals.

The article goes into great detail regarding various factors, but I particularly like the list of the top ten positive factors they provide.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site