Summary of SEO - What and What Not (My beliefs on SEO)
- SEO |
In spite of every single discussion that gets done on SEO, I still see literally hundreds of discussions on a number of topics that ask, "exactly what to do for SEO".
And I see the most confused ones going in circles, wasting efforts and money, and running pillar to post are newbies, and some intermediates too.
So let me talk a little on SEO for Google. I hope it would remove many confusions once and for all.
But who am I to talk on SEO? Please let me cite some of my credentials and achievements.
I have been on the first page and #1 rank for Google in many terms, including competitve ones that I choose to. I have been ranked #1 for terms that I have targeted, with a single sale leading to more than $200 in commissions even for physical products (yes, products priced even more than $3,500). With a fair bit of conifdence I can claim that I have seen the SEO field to a good extent.
And my education being on Computer Science all through (have a Masters of Technology degree and hope to do a PhD also from some world-leading university in near future) I have a rare combination of understanding the computer science behind it, which is critical and goes missing in most of the discussions.
EDIT: I decided to add this line now after reading Mike's post below - whatever I describe here is purely on my understanding but with the best of intentions and with the best of my capabilities. But anyone reading this is suggested to take action only as per their belief and understanding. Please do not trust me if you do not want to - and if you trust me then please do that at your own responsibility. This is purely an informational thread and no selling is intended - please do not buy any SEO related or any other product from me anywhere, here on Warrior Forum or anywhere outside, beacause of this thread. End of EDIT.
Lets go ahead to the topic now. Technically I could go much deeper, but I want the thread to be simply enough so that even newbies with no related background can easily understand it. So I am avoiding all the mathematics and writing in simple English here.
There are two main sides when it comes to SEO on Google in practice (I am not associated with Google in any way, and what I am saying here is what I have seen to work repeatedly, and some general theory including the related Computer Science portion). (1) On page SEO and (2) Off page SEO. To see top rankings in your SEO efforts, you have to shine on both the fronts.
Important: in my belief, if your on-page SEO score is A and offpage SEO score is B, then your total SEO score is (A x B) and not (A + B). What does that mean? That means, a slight deviation in any of the two compoments would hurt your score badly.
Next fundamental question would be, how to do on-page and off-page SEO?
How to do on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is a combination of the following factors:
Page-title
Meta-tags
Meta-description
H1, H2 etc tags
Content
Boldened, italicized and underlined content
Outbound (relevant) links
There are differences of opinions on whether some of these parameters are counted any more, such as meta-tags and meta-description and whether or not outbound (relevant) links hurt more than help, but each of them do set up the context for the search engine. And you must write your on-page content accordingly.
Now comes the keyword. The main keyword must appear a few times, and there should be related keywords (use Google Adwords Keyword External Tool to find related keywords easily in a minute or so and for free). And the overall topic must be relevant - the stage of Natural Language Processing is advancedd enough nowadays to differentiate between obvious bad page versus good page (not yet good enough to identify a well-spun article with its original one, but may catch badly-spun ones as garbages).
When it comes to the keyword (niche), there is a mixture between an off-page factor - your competition - with the on-page factor. This is the TF-IDF (stands for Term Frequency - Inverted Document Frequency) quotient.
Inverted Document Frequency (IDF) is computed from what we call "competition" in practice. The higher the competition is for a keyword, the lower is the IDF score. It is like inverting the number of occurrences of the keyword in the Internet to see how scarce/available the term is. So if some term like "the", "is" etc appear in every document, the appearance count is very very high, so th inversion (1 divided by this count) is extremely low, and the term is practically ignored - automatically. If you realize, IDF is the off-page factor that we look at when many of us start selecting a niche hoping to do SEO on it later.
Term Frequency (TF) is a different beast. This is the what we call the "keyword density" - how many times does this appear on the page. Now, every LSI word has a similarity score with the main term, so every LSI occurrence improves the TF count without touching the term. The way I think Google computes keyword stuffing is by looking at TF (sufficient occurences but within a higher bound - and the longer the article/content is probably the lower the TF should be in terms of percentage), the score gained by the term due to LSI relevance (frequency of each LSI applied x the relevance score of that LSI), and adding this TF with the LSI-related score to come up with the TF-score.
Now that it has got the TF-score and the IDF-score, it will multiply these two to come up with the TF-IDF score.
By the way, all the factors such as title, meta, content, H1-H2-H3-etc andd bold-italics-underline etc mentioned above, get merged to form parts of the TF-score. So you now know what to do to improve each of these factors now and get a good TF score - apply the core keyword not too many times but definitely do apply it, and then follow that up by mixing a good variation of LSI (Latent Semantic Index keywords - which are relate and similar keywords with respect to the main keywords).
Getting a good TF-score is critical once you have selected your niche and keywords (and thus your IDF score is frozen) to get the best of on-page SEO.
Do you now know why some article directories, for example, rank better and easier with the same/similar article/content than others, even if they appear to have the same page rank?
That is because, they provide a great framework for the on-page SEO to happen automatically (for example, the right kind of inherent tags get generated capturing the keywords and LSI keywords).
And with some tweak to your webpage, there is no reason you should not be able to do the same.
Also, by using the right keyword combined with the right LSI, different articles will rank differently in search results for the term even if they are in the same article irectory, for example. Or, the rank in search results of your page will change.
Now of to off-page SEO, where most of the things still happen.
This post has become long enough, so let me split my overall content to another post to complete what I wanted to say and remove the gray uncertainties of SEO from many of your minds, particularly newbies.
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