The SEO Conundrum
A heedless dependence on link building is the most frequent cause of search engine result placement failure. Links are not only not everything, but they also mean nothing if they lead to unimportant material.
The documents that have the highest relevance score to a given query are used by search engines to determine how to answer it. Relevance is determined by the query terms' emphasis, repetition, or combination of the two. Search engines generally believe that the document contains the majority of repetition and emphasis.
Link citation is considered valuable because of this. Links on the ideal Web would always lead to genuinely valuable content, and link anchor language would always provide a precise and accurate description of the content.
Although search engines don't technically stake their entire reputation on link citation, that is rarely the case in reality. They do try to verify the sources they are linked to.
Nevertheless, the fundamental SEO formula is as follows:
Repetition * Emphasis * Value = Optimization
Many SEOs mistakenly believe that the most crucial ranking indicators are off-page as Value can only exist off the document, but Repetition and Emphasis can occur on or off the document. For this reason, outranking someone who tries to rank through links is typically simple.
For content to rank well in most searches and to stay there, links are also necessary. Although a small percentage of website owners can rank their sites only through connections, most do not have the means to create such extensive connecting networks. If you don't have any material, you're trapped until you can get a lot of people to help you generate a link bomb.
Even link baiting needs to prioritize good content.
Value is reliant on Trust in today's Trust-based search indexing environment. In other words, only Trusted pages provide value, hence the SEO formula should truly look more like this:
(On-page + Off-page Repetition) * Emphasis + Trusted(Value) = Optimization
Keyword density does not equate to repetition. It is just the keyword being used repeatedly in a document, nothing more. However, repetition only really works if it appears natural. A spam filter may be activated simply by including search engine optimization, SEO, search engine optimization, and search engine optimization in a page. Perhaps you might say the terms aloud a bit more frequently than that.
Nevertheless, SEO copywriters make an effort to incorporate the keywords into headers, phrases, paragraphs, picture captions, and/or ALT= text in addition to strategically placing them throughout the article.
Italics, bold, big fonts, Hx headers, title tags, underlined text, and the usage of "quotes" are some ways to indicate emphasis. Text can also be emphasized with colour. Naturally, each search engine determines how to provide a score for emphasis; there is no standard formula for emphasis. Emphasis may and should be used when it suits your readers.
Because they heavily utilize repetition and emphasis, slick sales pages that feature numerous repetitive lines and phony testimonials frequently score highly (also, they frequently trigger spam filters for the same reason). I don't like phony testimonials and lots of words on smarmy sales pitch pages. Your mileage might be different.
Now, since basic optimization is rather easy, why is it that so many people find it difficult? One reason is that, regrettably, there aren't many basic optimization rules, and most people choose to ignore the great majority of them. You're not doing SEO right if your plan mentions PageRank.
Relevance is unrelated to PageRank. PageRank does cause you to get crawled, and it can be an indication of value and trust—two significant concepts. Having the highest PageRank on the internet does not, however, make your page relevant for every given inquiry.
Some people post links on blogs and forums with nothing more than punctuation as the anchor text. This is known as link spamming. To what extent do they affect the relevance ratings of their target pages? To what extent does such PageRank (if it exists and is permitted to pass) increase the relevance of those destination pages?
It's possible that link spammers are merely trying to get their pages indexed and crawled. If you visit enough blogs and forums, it might work, but most people aren't going to be able to do that. In actuality, your chances of benefiting from your links decrease the more blogs and forums you rely on for them.
Although a few highly clever people might possess quite substantial lists of susceptible, value-passing blogs and forums that they can take advantage of, the value that these blogs and forums can pass decreases with each successful exploit. Sharing your linking sources with others increases the likelihood that those pages will lose their capacity to convey value significantly, especially if those others provide little to no original, valuable material.
Sharing linking sources among SEOs makes them their own worst enemies.
The deadliest opponents of SEOs are those who believe that building links will raise their ranks.
Try adding extra content to a page that is indexed but not ranking if it isn't Supplemental. It might be sufficient for you.
Naturally, your rivals will be able to add more content if they can. And this is the point at which SEOs frequently make mistakes. You run the risk of alienating your visitors in addition to maybe being blocked by spam filters if you add information just to increase repetition and emphasis.
People utilize query terminology specific to each Web business to locate other Web businesses. In general, most online marketers don't use most of the value phrases that are available in their business query language. The desire to keep adding links and repeating information decreases when you learn to create content around the complete vocabulary rather than just your preferred query terms. Your ability to disregard it will increase as a result of your improved optimization abilities.
- Effective optimization resists the pull of temptation.
- Effective optimization is productive.
- Either the most competitive phrases or the long tail of search (which is too big and diversified to be of any meaningful utility) are not the focus of good optimization.
- Effective use of the SEO formula is what makes for good optimization, not the use of formulaic SEO.
- A well-optimized system travels a straight line toward its objective. You're done once you arrive. There is no need for more content. You don't need to construct any additional links.
- The time has come to stop optimizing websites if you're unsure of when to quit.