Google, however, has over 200 ranking signals that it has also publicly stated. Kasteler believes this number is probably closer to 1,000 signals. As a result, he doesn’t think that people should make such a big deal about site speed.

“The fact that it will affect you is highly unlikely,” he said.

Kasteler goes on to explain to WebProNews that Google still places relevance above all other factors. In other words, if you do have a fast site, it doesn’t always mean that you will rank above your competitors.

“You can have the fastest site in all the world, faster than all your competitors, but you still need to be relevant,” he added.

To summarize his thoughts, speed will not impact your site’s ranking if you do not have relevant content. Speed is an important factor but only after the relevance criteria is met. For example, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft all conducted studies on pages that loaded quickly against pages that didn’t load quickly. They found a 7-12 percent increase in conversions on the pages that loaded faster. Mozilla, specifically, found a 15.4 percent increase on pages that were only one second faster.

Kasteler believes that because speed impacts conversions and usability, it is more important than SEO.

“Having a fast site is way more important than SEO,” he said.

So, by having relevant content and fast site, everyone wins.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz also talked with us about ranking factors, but took a different angle. Experts are quick to offer advice on how to get your site to rank well, but does their advice match the data? What the data shows is what really matters. For example, Rand says the experts say H1 tags are very important, but actual data shows that they have a very low correlation with rankings.

So what advice does Rand offer for ranking well? He says titles tags, anchor text, on page keyword usage, and social aspects are all important factors. Social aspects are hard to measure, but Rand points out that they influence ranking with the search engines in an indirect way. He also agrees with Laura that there has to be a distinguishing factor involved in order to outrank competitors. Taking it one step further, Rand says the product not only has to be compelling, but it also has to give people an incentive to want to link.

Because SEO is constantly changing, you need to look at the data to make sure that your efforts match your goals.

Are the traditional ranking factors changing? What new factors are now included in the game?

Now, nearly four months after the announcement, there seems to be a problem. During a session at SMX Advanced, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts revealed that he had found some examples of the Canonical Tag not being obeyed by Google. He raises the issue that the Canonical Tag is merely a “hint” to Google and cannot be fully relied on.

As a result, Stephan recommends using 301 redirects since they are direct and will be obeyed. Stephan believes that Google misunderstood the explanation of his position since a debate broke out about nofollow and PR sculpting during the session and involved Matt Cutts and Nathan Buggia. Lisa Barone, who liveblogged the debate, recalls that Matt indicated that nofollow was not as effective as it once was. Nathan also stated Bing’s position that PR sculpting using nofollow was not a very valuable tactic for users to implement.

At this point, there has been no clarification of the issue. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Stephan? How do you think this will get resolved?

If you do have a real issue, Vanessa Fox suggests that you benchmark. Look at the top ten queries that give you the most traffic and find out what pages rank for them and what the position is. By doing this, you can better determine where the problem is.

To verify a crawling issue, Vanessa advises that you run a script over the server logs to look at search engine bot activity. This step allows you to see how well your site is crawled, how often it is crawled, and also helps to categorize your pages.

For more information on these issues, Vanessa has several checklists listed on Jane and Robot, which include: Discoverability Checklist, Accessibility Checklist, and User Conversion Checklist. Also, Jane and Robot is hosting a Developer Summit Friday, June 12 and will examine these very issues. You can access the registration information here.

There’s a lot more to SEO than just ranking number one in Google for a key phrase. Since searches based on personalization and localization are becoming more and more prevalent, Matt echoes Bruce’s words that the central focus for SEO’s should be traffic and conversions.

With all these innovations, the game is changing for SEO’s. Matt says they are now marketers and need to embrace universal search by integrating video, images, books, etc. As far as Google trends go for 2009, they will affect SEO’s as well. Matt reports how black hat SEO is “getting more malicious” and shamelessly illegal.

In summary, SEO’s need to be aware of these actions and act accordingly. They need to decide where they stand on legal and ethical issues and how they will adjust their strategies to compatibly adapt to these new trends.