[petecampbell]

I'm sorry but you have a few details wrong in this post.

If you're concerned about referencing keywords, you could do it in body copy as opposed to the post title.

Also, rankings are largely influenced by the number of sites linking to a post, alongside on-page keyword references, well-built sites and user experience. Social signals are just a catalyst - not a direct factor.

[pknight]

I'm sorry, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Stay current with what is going on, SEOMOZ and SearchEngineLand are good sources.

And btw, the core message in his post is very good one. Lots of people are convinced they need to optimize their titles to death for greater SEO success. Tools like Yoast's SEO plugin for WordPress and WP Scribe encourage that kind of boxed idea of SEO. Especially newcomers just get confused by this. If you create content people want to read and share, they will increase the ranking factors of your page. It starts with a good title. I'd say the social factor is a direct a factor can get when it comes to raising search engine visibility.

[TomAnthony]

I think you both (parent and grandparent comments) have good points. The fact of the matter is that there are numerous factors towards rankings [1] that interact in complex ways. Furthermore, unless your a Google engineer this is a black box situation, so nobody can ever be sure.

The fact is that social signals correlate well with search results [2], yet it is hard to show which direction the causation might be flowing [3].

petecampbell is right that body content keywords are important, as are backlinks. pknight is correct about the spirit of the article and the problem of over optimisation. However, the article did feel a little like the authors understanding was not fully up to date. However, that is the case for a large portion of bloggers and so it is no bad thing to reiterate it.

The key takeaway is: concentrate on making great content that people want to read, and many of them will share it (via social media, or by linking to it) and you will be off to a good start in both search and social. There are other factors, but doing this part right is the most important (and often hardest) step.

[1] http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors [2] http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/searchmetrics/press/ranking-... [3] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-improved-social-signals-cause-...

[WillyF]

What about the parent comment indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about?

Here are some Matt Cutts quotes from two weeks ago:

"Over time, Google will care more about identity and social reputation."

"Links still have many, many good years ahead of them."

"We like standards that are available on the open web. If we’re not able to crawl something – like Facebook or like the time we temporarily ran into problems with Twitter – we don’t want to depend on that data."

It's pretty obvious that Google is taking a very slow approach to mixing in social signals. They want Google+ to be THE social signal, and that isn't close to happening yet. Social can be a great way to build links, but calling I definitely would not call it a direct factor at this point.

[pknight]

Links are important, naturally. When they are coming organically as a direct result of social engagement, even better. You're more likely to get social engagement if you don't compromise the human readable title and content for the sake of SEO.

But quotes like these >> rankings are largely influenced by the number of sites linking to a post are very inaccurate and wouldn't come from someone who is keeping up to date with SEO. You can have tens of thousands of links and it could actually be hurting your SEO, which is why some sites are scrambling to take down links just to recover.

It's also worth noting that you can go crazy with on-page factors, having the perfect post slug, the right keyword density, keyword rich anchor text, descriptive meta descriptions, no-follow links, a limited amount of links on the page etc and it can end up biting you in the butt: overoptimizing can hurt your google rankings. The message coming from Google is pretty clear: create high quality content and make it accessible, don't get too clever with SEO. They will only get better at incorporating social signals into their rankings.

[stritar]

Thank you very much sir, that was what just I wanted to say. :)