Oscar Carreras: is it really all about links?
Oscar Carreras is a good friend and an ex colleague of mine. We have been working together for almost 3 years in a multilingual SEO company and I know him well enough to be sure he won’t get upset about this article 
Following an article he published on his must-read SEO blog we had a discussion about the most important ranking factors in Google.
In this article he claims that on-page SEO counts a “miserable” 15% in terms of ranking factors while links counts a massive 70%… Despite I have to recognize the power of links coming from authorities sites, being a big fan of landing pages and on-page optimisation I have to disagree with Oscar Carreras. Having a website well optimised will not only increases the conversion rate but it will make the site ranking better, increasing the CTR.
I know where Oscar is coming from though: before to join a very well known travel site he’s been the head of the glorious spam link building team here at WebCertain (where we use to call him “Señor Oscar Carreras“) and he’s the biggest expert of international link building I have ever met. Still I think that he should revise this percentages: even though nowadays everyone is mad about Links and Social media stuff, I really believe that a good old boring On-Page Optimisation is the basic of every web-marketing campaign. Think about it: your pages are the playground where you can freely test, change and eventually improve your site performance. Off-Site factors most of the time depend on someone else.
Anyhow, the reason why I decided to publish this “article” is to see… how high I can rank for the keyword Oscar Carreras, using ONLY on-site SEO techniques.
Oscar Carreras, is the targeted keyword and it appears in a prominent position in the title tag, it appears in the meta description and in the meta keywords. You can easily find Oscar Carreras in the url, in the alt tag, in the main heading and, obviously, I have mentioned Oscar Carreras few times in the content.
Of course this is a wordpress template so I am a bit limited in what I can do but let’s say that the on-page optimisation is acceptable…
I promise I won’t do any link building to this page (I assume some links may come naturally), I may submit it to Twitter or Facebook a couple of times just to let Oscar know about it but that’s it. It’s an honest experiment. Let’s see how high I can get in the SERP for Oscar Carreras!
And let’s see if my good old friend Oscar Carreras will take the challenge and try to rank for the keyword Davide Corradi, using ONLY off-site SEO techniques!
9th February 2010 – First Ranking Report update
Related Posts:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
First update: After less than 12 hours Oscar Carreras is ranking already in second page for my name. I made some tweaking on this page. Let’s see how it goes.
You are doing fine – you are now on rank 7 for Oscar Carreras since 10 minutea ago. Right below my blog which ranks 6 for Oscar Carreras with a relatively outdated page. I wish Google would be a bit more efficient in updating…