You here people talk about SEO, but how many actually understand what it takes to appease search engine algorithms in order to acquire multiple first page rankings? With the thresholds of reputable and relevant content changing daily, a holistic approach is required for organic SEO.
Search engines are based on mathematical equations programmed to parse billions of documents, compare nodes of relevance and extract context from content. Unless you know what it is that they value as significant, you may be using the wrong approach.
Before you segment and deem any aspect of SEO as any less significant than the other, you need to understand how search engines work.
Search engines pay particular attention to metrics such as "term frequency", (meaning how many times a said keyword appears in both a document and the entire website). Based on this frequency, the context of other keywords, the order in which they appear, and if those keywords are used as anchor text (links) either from other pages in the website or from external websites also impacts the degree of relevance a keyword has.
This term weighting is one primary metric that search engines use to assess relevance. Another significant factor is the amount of deep links a page has. Deep links are link to a specific page (other than the home page) and signifies that that page has something unique to offer to potential visitors.
The homepage is one of the easiest pages to get ranked in search engines; however it is not always the best page to convert new visitors into customers. For this reason, it is better to elect other pages crafted specifically for a conversion objective (a sale, contact form request, etc.) with the keywords that represent that page, this is called a preferred landing page.
Preferred landing pages can be topic specific and targeted (much like a pay per click landing page) and receive their ranking factor from other pages in the website through internal linking. Ideally the homepage should contain 60-65% of the total links to a website and the remaining 40-45% of the links from other websites should be distributed (based on importance through deep links).
In addition to deep links and internal links to a landing page, sitemaps are another great method to funnel vital ranking factor to sub pages or sub folders in a website. Through the holistic use of (a) enough topical content on a keyword / subject (b) sufficient internal links (links from other relevant pages in the website) and (c) deep links from other websites a particular page can develop authority for the primary keywords or keywords that occur on that page.
SEO is simply a process of removing obstructions that do not allow each page in a website to clearly indicate relevance. For example, off topic title tags, similar meta data, lack of internal links, lack of deep links or external links from other sites, poor site architecture or dozens of other factors aside from competition can stand in your path between your website and the top 10.
Ideally starting with the goal in mind vs. after the fact optimization is a tangible solution. So, unless you are ready to add a significant amount of fresh content, revise existing pages or perhaps change the surface of your website to delve deeper in the metrics that matter, then SEO and high rankings may not be for you.
On the contrary, if you understand the value of traffic and more importantly conversion from consumers who are actually finding what they are looking for, then the process of optimization is a necessary step to reach those in need of your product or service.
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