Marketing Pilgrim

Andy Beal is no longer associated with Fortune Interactive. View Andy’s consulting services.

We’ve just announced details of the first public SEMLogic study which took the keyword “laptop” and analyzed the Top 100 results in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEMLogic uses artificial intelligence, quantitative analysis and latent semantic analysis among its many tools to analyze what the search engines themselves consider to be the most important optimization elements. Measuring down to the keyword-level allows us to note differences among keywords and search engines, allowing our clients to benefit from precise SEO campaigns.

So what did we discover?

* Inbound link quality was the most important factor across all three search engines.
* For inbound links, the reputation of the originating page was more important than the page’s relevance to the keyword “laptop”.
* For the keyword “laptop”, off-page optimization factors out-weighed any on-page optimization factor.
* The most important on-page factor for Google was Title-tag keyword density
* Web pages that successfully ranked across the engines all had strong values in at least the two most important influential factors for each search engine respectively.

You can read the full study for free at the Fortune Interactive site. Next week, we’ll analyze another competitive industry keyword and share with you our findings.

By analyzing different keywords across different verticals, we aim to demonstrate that SEO factors vary at the keyword level and that you can’t just make blanket statements across the board.