SEO Education Review
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The use of SEO services is a concrete decision that can improve your site's ranking and save time, but also has a high risk to your site and reputation.Guide To Seo Education in 2019
Search Engine Succes Factors, Search Rankings, Search Results and Search Engine Spam Penalties see more for detail guide go to below.- Technique Search Engine Success Factors
- Content & Search Engine Success Factors
- Site Architecture & Search Engine Success Factors
- HTML Code & Search Engine Success Factors
- Trust, Authority, Identity & Search Rankings
- Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines
- Personalization & Search Engine Rankings
- Social Media & Ranking In Search Results
- Violations & Search Engine Spam Penalties
=> On-the-page SEO
=> Off-the-page SEO
=> Violations
Within each group are subgroups, as each chapter of this SEO guide will explain. These subgroups contain one or more individual SEO factors with a specific weight or importance.
Violations, while a group unto themselves, are displayed under the group and subgroup to which they’re associated.
Those two-letter acronyms you see on the chart above? That’s our play on the periodic table of elements and the letter representations, or symbol, of each element. You may have had to remember that the symbol for gold was Au or that iron’s was Fe.
In the Periodic Table of SEO, we’ve tried to make it slightly more intuitive. The first letter of each “SEO element” comes from the subgroup that it’s in, and the second letter stands for the individual factor.
On-the-page =>
On-the-page search ranking factors are those that are almost entirely within the publisher’s own control.
Off-the-page =>
ranking factors are those that publishers do not directly control. Search engines use these because they learned early on that relying on publisher-controlled signals alone didn’t always yield the best results. For instance, some publishers may try to make themselves seem more relevant than they are in reality.
With billions of web pages to sort through, looking only at “on-the-page” clues isn’t enough. More signals are needed to return the best pages for any particular search.
= >SEO violations & ranking penalties
Make no mistake search engines want people to perform SEO because it can help improve their search results. Search engines provide help in the form of guidelines, blog posts and videos to encourage specific SEO techniques.
However, there are some techniques that search engines deem “spam” or “black hat,” which could result in your pages receiving a ranking penalty, or worse, being banned from the search engines entirely.
Violations are generally tactics meant to deceive or manipulate a search engine’s understanding of a site’s true relevancy and authority.
=> Weighting of search ranking factors
All the factors we show are weighted on a scale of 1 to 3, as shown in the top right corner of each factor, as well as reflected in the hue of that factor. A weighting of 3 is most important and is something you should pay special attention to because it has a bigger impact than other factors.
That doesn’t mean that factors weighted 2 or 1 aren’t important; they are. It’s just that they are of less importance, relatively speaking, in terms of the other factors on the chart. Violations are also weighted, but in negative numbers, with -3 being the worst and potentially most harmful to your SEO success.
The weighting is based on a combination of what search engines have said, surveys of the SEO community and our own expertise and experience in watching the space over time. We don’t expect them to be perfect. Not everyone will agree. Your mileage may vary. But we’re confident it is a useful general guide.
=> Missing SEO factors & the Guide’s philosophy
Experienced SEOs may be wondering why some factors aren’t shown. How come ALT text and bolding words aren’t included as HTML factors.
=> Content quality
More than anything, do you produce quality content? If you sell something, do you go beyond a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites?
Quality content sites based on the arrangement of words based on topics and discussions that are assembled with the topic.
=> Keyword Research
Perhaps the most important SEO factor after creating good content is good keyword research. You want to create content using those keywords, the actual search terms people are using, so you can produce content that effectively “answers” that query.
=> use of Keywords
Having done your keyword research (you did that, right?), have you actually used those words in your content? Or if you’ve already created some quality content before doing research, perhaps it’s time to revisit that material and do some editing.
Just use common sense. Think about the words you want a page to be found for, the words you feel are relevant from your keyword research. Then use them naturally on the page. If you commonly shift to pronouns on second and further references, maybe use the actual noun again here and there, rather than a pronoun.
=> Content freshness
You can’t update your pages (or the publish date) every day thinking that will make them “fresh” and more likely to rank. Nor can you just add new pages constantly, just for the sake of having new pages, and think that gives you a freshness boost.
=> Vertical search
The other factors on this table cover success for web page content in search engines. But alongside these web page listings are also often “vertical” results. These come from “vertical” search engines devoted to things like images, news, local and video. If you have content in these areas, it might be more likely to show up within special sections of the search results page.
Search engines “crawl” websites, going from one page to another incredibly quickly, acting like hyperactive speed-readers. They make copies of your pages that get stored in what’s called an “index,” which is like a massive book of the web.
=> Mobile-friendly
Google is rewarding sites that are mobile-friendly with a chance of better rankings on mobile searches while those that aren’t might have a harder time appearing. Bing, too, is doing the same.
So get your site mobile-friendly. You’ll increase your chance of success with search rankings as well as making your mobile visitors happy. In addition, if you have an app, consider making use of app indexing and linking, which both search engines offer.
=> Canonicalization
Sometimes that big book, the search index, gets messy. Flipping through it, a search engine might find page after page after page of what looks like virtually the same content, making it more difficult for it to figure out which of those many pages it should return for a given search. This is not good.
=> Site speed
Google wants to make the web a faster place and has declared that speedy sites get a small ranking advantage over slower sites.
=> HTML title tag
Imagine that you wrote 100 different books but gave them all the same exact title.
=> The meta description tag
The meta description tag, one of the oldest supported HTML elements, allows you to suggest how you’d like your pages to be described in search listings. If the HTML title is the equivalent of a book title, the meta description is like the blurb on the back describing the book.
=> Structured data
What if you could tell search engines what your content was about in their own “language?” Behind the scenes, sites can use specific markup (code) that makes it easy for search engines to understand the details of the page content and structure.
=> Header tags
See the headline up at the top of this page? Behind the scenes, HTML code is used to make that a header tag. In this case, an H1 tag.
See the sub-headlines on the page? Those also use header tags. Each of them is the next “level” down, using H2 tags.
=> Authority
Is your site an authority? Is it a widely recognized leader in its field, area, business or in some other way? That’s the goal.
No one knows exactly how search engines calculate authority and, in fact, there are probably multiple “authority” signals. The type of links your site receives (lots of quality or neighborhood links?) or social references (from respected accounts?) and engagement metrics (long clicks?) may all play a role in site authority. Of course, negative sentiment and reviews may hurt site authority.
=> Engagement
A quality site should produce meaningful interactions with users. Search engines may try to measure this interaction engagement in a variety of ways.
For example, how long do users stay on your page? Did they search, click through to your listing, but then immediately “bounce” back to the results to try something else? That “pogosticking” behavior can be measured by search engines and could be a sign that your content isn’t engaging.
=> History
Since search engines are constantly visiting your website, they can get a sense of what’s normal or how you’ve behaved over time.
Are you suddenly linking out to what the search engines euphemistically call “bad neighborhoods?” Are you publishing content about a topic you haven’t typically covered? Such things might raise alarm bells.
Then again, sites do change, just as people do, and often for the better. Changes aren’t taken in isolation. Other factors are also assessed to determine if something worrisome has happened.
Similarly, a site with a history of violating guidelines and receiving multiple penalties may find it more difficult to work their way back to search prominence.
=> Link quality
Unless you’ve had a really bad experience with doctors, you’d probably trust the advice from the doctors. Even though you’re getting fewer opinions, you’re getting those opinions from experts. The quality of their opinions is better, so they carry more weight.
=> Link text/anchor text
Amazon has millions of links pointing at it. Yet, it doesn’t rank for “boats.” It does rank for books. Why? Many of those links pointing at Amazon say the word “books” within the links, while relatively few say “boats,” since Amazon doesn’t sell boats.
The words within a link — the link text or “anchor text” — are seen by search engines as the way one website is describing another. It’s as if someone’s pointing at you in real life and saying “books” and declaring you an expert on that topic.
You often can’t control the words people use to link to you, so capitalize on your opportunities to influence anchor text, within reason.
=> Number of links Plenty of sites have found that getting a whole lot of links can add up to SEO success. Even more so if you’re getting a lot of links from many different sites. All things being equal, 1,000 links from one site will mean far less than 1000 links from 1000 sites.
Long ago, the sheer number of links used to be far more important, but the number has decreased steadily in importance as search engines have learned how to better evaluate the quality of links.
Of course, there’s still a lot of commonality. It’s not that everyone sees completely different results. Instead, everyone sees many of the same “generic” listings. But there will also be some listings appearing because of where someone is, who they know or how they surf the web.
=> Country One of the easiest personalization ranking factors to understand is that people are shown results relevant to the country they’re in.
Someone in the US searching for “football” will get results about American football; someone in the UK will get results about the type of football that Americans would call soccer.
=> Locality Search engines don’t stop personalizing at the country level. They’ll tailor results to match the city or metropolitan area based on the user’s location.
As with country personalization, if you want to appear when someone gets city-specific results, you need to ensure your site is relevant to that city.
=> Personal history What has someone been searching for and clicking on from their search results? What sites do they regularly visit?
This type of personal history is used to varying degrees and ways by both Google and Bing to influence search results. Unlike country or city personalization, there’s no easy way to try and make yourself more relevant.
For the record, Google has repeatedly said that it’s not using the major social networks of Facebook and Twitter as a means to rank pages. However, conventional wisdom among many SEOs and our own view is that social is important as an indirect factor.
=> Social reputation Just as search engines don’t count all links equally, they don’t view all social accounts as being the same. This makes sense, since anyone can create a new account on a social network. What’s to prevent someone from making 100 different accounts to manufacture fake buzz?
Nothing, really, other than the fact that fake accounts like these can often be easy to spot. They may only have a handful of “quality” friends in their network, and few might pass along material they share.
=> Social shares Similar to links, getting quality social shares is ideal, but being shared widely on social networks is still helpful. Good things happen when more people see your site or brand.
Again, participation in social sharing sites is crucial. If you don’t have a Twitter account, a Facebook fan page or a Google+ Page you’re missing out. You’re not building up a network that can help spread (aka share) your content, site and brand.
A word of reassurance: Very few people who believe they’ve spammed a search engine have actually done so. It’s hard to accidentally spam and search engines look at a variety of signals before deciding if someone deserves a harsh penalty.
=> Thin or Shallow Content
Responding to a drumbeat of complaints about poor search results, Google rolled out its “Panda” update in February 2011. Panda targets what is described as “thin” or “shallow” content or content that is lacking in substance.
This domain-level penalty targets sites with a predominant amount of so-so content and essentially treats it similarly to the way it treats overt spam techniques.
Today, it’s no longer a question of whether the content is simply relevant, but also whether it is valuable to the user.
=> Cloaking
Let’s talk sophisticated hiding. How about rigging your site so that search engines are shown a completely different version from the one humans see?
That’s called cloaking. Search engines really don’t like it. It’s one of the worst things you could do. Heck, Google’s even banned itself for cloaking. Seriously.
While most people are unlikely to accidentally spam a search engine, the opposite is true when it comes to cloaking. That’s why there’s such a heavy penalty if you’re caught doing it. It’s a bait-and-switch, and it’s seen as a deliberate attempt to manipulate search results.
=> Keyword stuffing
It’s one of the oldest spam tactics on the books, yet it’s still being used, and the search engines still don’t like it. Search engines say to use words you want to be found for on your pages. OK, I’ll give them those words over and over again! How about 100 times. In a row? That work for you, Google?
Actually, no, it doesn’t. That’s “keyword stuffing,” and it could get you penalized.
How often is too often? There’s no correct answer here, but you’d really have to go to extremes to cause this penalty to kick in. It’s most likely to happen to non-SEOs who just don’t know better and might decide to paste a word many times in a row, typically at the bottom of a web page.
=> Hidden text
Once you decide to keyword stuff, your next thought will probably be “Why don’t I hide all this text that no human wants to see?” You might make the text white, so it blends with a page’s background. In doing so, you will have spammed a search engine.
Search engines don’t like anything hidden. They want to see everything that a user sees. Don’t hide text, whether by using styles, fonts, display:none or any other means that so a typical user can’t see it.
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