Now, I know there are many of you who don't have any control over your company's website, because the operation is run by an overseas head office which doesn't have a clue about effective online marketing, and considers its own empire-building to be more important than selling products and supporting customers. I have a tremendous amount of respect for your patience, and presumably look forward to renewing our acquaintance at a more enlightened employer as soon as the job market improves. In the meantime, I think it's important that you don't commit to any outsourced SEO work, because it's not a job which can be done properly, and any reputable SEO experts will probably decline the work. Unless your site is a total basket-case, without even the most elementary stuff in place, you should be extremely suspicious of those who still want to take your money from you.

Why SEO will need to make changes to your website

The key to link-building

One of the first findings is that while the links to a page (and indeed a site) are still the most important factor in a page's ranking, the importance may have fallen a bit over the past couple of years. But don't get carried away with this finding: it's still the case that nothing counts more than external links. It's just that other factors continue to rise in importance. And it's the diversity of links, rather than the sheer quantity, which helps the most – so get links from as many different sites as you can.

On the page itself, the survey suggests that longer pages tend to fare better than short ones; long titles and URLs are bad; and getting those keywords in at the start of documents or tags is a great help. "Exact match domains", where the domain name is the same as the search term (e.g "bluewidget.com") are becoming less significant (thank goodness); and links from social media sites (especially Facebook shares, and links from authoritative Twitter accounts) seem to be increasingly important. Overall, there are are lot of interesting findings for those of us who deal in this sort of thing on a daily basis, but as a siteowner, I'd say the takeaways reinforce what you've known all along: write good length pages for real humans, and get plenty of external links to them, including from "social" sites.

Search engine success: what the experts think

Can Twitter have an effect which is broader than just informing your Twitter followers that you've got something new to say to them? Yes it can. Read A Tweet's Effect On Rankings – An Unexpected Case Study on SEOmoz to see one way how. Of course, as the folks concerned readily admit, they're dealing in big numbers here, but it does suggest that the links found in Twitter do have an effect on your Google ranking. Of course, one of the reasons it worked might be that sites publish Tweets on their pages, but as long as it gets results, we'll leave the SEO people to argue why.

Why Tweet?

What you need to do is to work out what the potential customers are looking for, and to muscle in on that territory. Just invented the world's first red widget, which nobody thought would ever happen, so nobody's looking for? Write some articles about boring old blue widgets, get the widget buyers to your site through natural or paid-for search, and then drop the red widget bomb on them.

One of our AdWords clients produces some specialist equipment of interest to surgeons. The problem is, surgeons don't know these great products are available and few are looking for them. So the smart response has been to brainstorm what surgeons are looking for, and the client came up with "information about professional conferences". Now – as a user resource – the company has created a page on its website listing forthcoming conferences worldwide, and we can get to work promoting that through AdWords and in the natural search results. Needless to say, nobody's going to leave that information page unaware of the company's product range.

There's a good discussion of this topic in How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand on SEOmoz.

What happens if nobody's looking for you?