The most common reason for failure to rank in search engine results is a blind reliance upon linkage. Not only are links not everything, they aren’t anything if there is insubstantial content being linked to.
Search engines resolve queries on the basis of which documents score the highest for relevance to the queries. Relevance is established through either repetition (of the query terms) or emphasis (of the query terms) or both. Generally speaking, the search engines assume that the majority of the repetition and emphasis occur on the document.
That is why link citation is deemed to be valuable. In a perfect Web, links would only point toward truly worthwhile content and link anchor text would always describe the content accurately and precisely.
That is rarely the case in practice, but the search engines don’t exactly bet the farm on link citation. They do make an effort to validate the linking sources.
Still, the basic SEO Formula looks like this:
Optimization = Repetition * Emphasis + Value
Since Repetition and Emphasis can occur either on or off the document, and since Value can only occur off the document, many SEOs wrongly assume that the most important ranking factors are off-page. And that is why it is usually easy to outrank people who attempt to rank through links.
It takes both links and content to achieve and maintain successful rankings in most queries. Some people do manage to rank solely through links, but the vast majority of Web site operators simply do not have the resources to build out those huge linking networks. Unless you can persuade a lot of people to help you create a link bomb, you’re stuck if you have no content.
Even link baiting requires good, darned good content being preferred.
In today’s Trust-based search indexing environment Value is dependent upon Trust. That is, you only get Value from Trusted pages, so the SEO formula really looks more like this:
Optimization = (On-page Repetition + Off-page Repetition) * Emphasis + Trusted(Value)
Repetition is not equivalent to keyword density. It is, plain and simple, the repeated use of the keyword throughout a document. But Repetition really only helps if it looks natural. Just embedding seo, SEO, seo seo, search engine optimization, search engine optimization in a document might trigger a spam filter. Well, maybe you have repeat the terms a little more often than that.
Instead of just stringing the keywords throughout the document, however, SEO copywriters strive to include the keywords in appropriate tags, in headers, in page URLs, and scattered across sentences and paragraphs (or in image captions and/or ALT= text).
Emphasis is established through italics, bold, large fonts, Hx headers, title tags, underscored text, and use of “quotes”. Colors may also be used to emphasize text. Each search engine, of course, decides how it wants to score emphasis and there is no universal emphasis formula. You can and should use emphasis as is appropriate for your readers.
Smarmy sales pages that scroll on through dozens of repetative paragraphs and faux testimonials often rank well simply because they make liberal use of both repetition and emphasis (and they often trip spam filters for the same reason). I, personally, dislike smarmy sales pitch pages that scroll on through dozens of paragraphs and faux testimonials. Your mileage may vary.
Now, given that basic optimization is relatively simple, why do so many people struggle with it? One reason is that most people ignore the vast majority of the fundamental principles of basic optimization (which is pretty sad given how few principles there are). If your SEO strategy includes the word PageRank, you’re doing it wrong.
PageRank has nothing to do with relevance. PageRank does get you crawled and it may be a reflection of trust and value, which are both important. But the highest PageRank on the Web doesn’t make your page relevant to any query.
There are link spammers who drop links in forums and blogs using nothing but punctuation as anchor text. How much are they influencing their target pages’ relevance scores? How much does that PageRank (if it’s there to pass and allowed to pass) improve those destination pages’ relevance?
Maybe the link spammers just want to get their pages crawled and indexed. It might work if you hit enough forums and blogs, but most people won’t be able to hit enough forums and blogs. In fact, the more forums and blogs you depend upon for your links, the less likely your links are helping you.
While a few very resourceful people may actually have relatively large lists of vulnerable, value-passing forums and blogs they can exploit, the value such forums and blogs can pass diminishes with each exploit. If you share your linking sources with other people, particularly people who offer little to no unique, worthwhile content, the odds of those pages losing their ability to pass value increase tremendously.
SEOs who share linking sources are their own worst enemies.
SEOs who expect to improve their rankings through links are their own worst enemies.
If you have a page that isn’t ranking but it is indexed and not Supplemental, try adding more content. That may be all you need.
Of course, if you can add more content, so can your competitors. And this is where SEOs often shoot themselves in the foot. If you add content for the sake of increasing your repetition and emphasis, you’re not only risking some sort of spam filtering, you’re risking the alienation of your visitors.
At this point, many people wrongly conclude that they must therefore resort to link building to stay within reasonable bounds, to avoid on-page spam filtering. The problem, rejecting the addition of content for linkage just puts you back into the boat with the hole in the bottom — you’re constantly bailing water.
The only way to avoid the Never-ending Optimization Trap is to simply ignore the temptation to improve both your on-page optimization and your link profile. If you don’t get it right the first time, learn from your mistake and wait until it’s time to redesign the Web site.
Adding more content and building more links for the sake of improving your search engine rankings works against you because you lose control of the process. Instead, you should be honing your skills to write good copy and to acquire value-passing links efficiently. The only way to do that is to practice, and the only way to practice is to delimit the amount of work you do per query.
Which leaves you only one reasonable option: you have to optimize for more than one query.
If you’re in the business of selling tooth picks over the Web, you’ve probably identified 10-20 keyword expressions people use to search for content like yours. I you’re just learning how to optimize, you should have 1 page of content for each keyword. If you have experience you should be able to optimize for 2-3 expressions per page.
But after you have exhausted your 10-20 targeted expressions you need to keep going. You need to find more expressions and optimize for them. You’ll eventually learn enough about optimization to be able to go back and reoptimize your original pages.
And the sweet thing is that you’re not stuck in the “long tail of search” zone. After all, you’re creating content that is semantically relevant to the business of selling tooth picks but you’re not locking yourself down into the repetitive haze of creating more and more content for a handful of keyword expressions.
Every Web business has a query vocabulary that people use to find such Web businesses. Generally speaking, most Web site marketers ignore the majority of value terms in their business query vocabulary. As you step back from your favorite query terms and learn to develop content around the entire vocabulary, the temptation to continuously build links and continuously add repetitive content weakens. You can more easily ignore it because you’re improving your optimization skills.
Good optimization does not give in to temptation.
Good optimization is efficient.
Good optimization does not focus on either the most competitive terms or the long tail of search (which is too diverse and broad to be of any real use).
Good optimization is not about employing formulaic SEO; it’s about using the SEO formula effectively.
Good optimization follows a clear path to a specific goal. Once you get there you’re done. No more content is necessary. No more link-building is necessary.
If you’re not sure of when to stop optimizing a Web site, then you’ve reached the point where you need to stop.
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