Unimportant SEO Ranking Factors in Google
So many things have been written about those important SEO ranking factors in Google. This article will talk about those unimportant ranking factors in Google that you need to get rid of in your campaign. These factors, which were previously popular and worked, have now been proven to be risky, ineffective, and/or ignored by the search engines when ranking pages.Removing these unimportant factors from your SEO checklist can save you a lot of time in your analysis, bring your SEO improvement actions up to date and reduce the risk of associated search engine penalties for some practices which are against Google search quality guidelines (especially for link-related factors).
This article will divide those unimportant factors into three major areas: keyword research and analysis; onsite SEO; and link analysis.
Keyword Research and Analysis
One of the increasingly unimportant factor in keyword analysis is the KEI (Keyword Effective Index). Why is this unimportant in 2011?
First you need to know the definition of the keyword effectiveness index. It is defined by the following equation: KEI = (S^2/C), where S is the popularity of the keyword in terms of searches, and C is the competition of the keyword, which is typically measured as the number of competing pages in Google for that keyword. A keyword is desirable if it has a high search volume and low number of competing web pages.
In the early of days of SEO, marketers were too concerned with ranking highly for popular terms. It might have been possible because of less competition on the Internet. Now that there are over 100 million websites on the Internet, and it's still growing, things can become very competitive. As the number of websites grow, the competition for highly-searched keywords increases. A keyword with a low competition and high search volume before may no longer fit in that category today.
Thus, KEI is not an effective measurement of keyword difficulty, since the probability of finding a high search volume keyword with a low number of competing web pages is becoming smaller each year.
What is effective in measuring keyword difficulty is to simply multiply the search volume of the keyword with the competing web pages:
Keyword difficulty= Keyword Search Volume (Exact match) x Google Competing web pages
This measurable factor has been well documented here: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Choosing-Keywords-Help/Keyword-Difficulty-vs-Size-of-Domain/. It shows that big websites (authority and trusted websites) are the ones that rank for difficult keywords. The keyword difficulty measurement in that article does not use the KEI method. Thus, it is advisable not to choose difficult keywords if your website is small or has just started on the Internet.
KEI also does not include information about the conversion rate, which is an important deciding factor in keyword research.
Onsite SEO Unimportant Factors
Keyword Density – Beware of SEO companies wanting to measure your content relevancy and quality in terms of keyword density and occurrences of keywords. This simply does not work anymore. It used to before, when old search engine algorithms counted the occurrences of keywords on an optimized page as a way of measuring the relevance of the document. Well, that factor got abused by spammers who simply stuffed keywords on the page and hid them.
Recent improvements in the search engine ranking algorithm can deeply understand the meaning and relevance of the document beyond the occurrences of keywords.
Thus you need to focus on writing a clear and user friendly text. Avoid putting any substantial text beneath your home page layout that cannot be read by your visitors. It is not user-friendly. As you write, forget keyword density or counting of your keywords. The important thing is to have your keyword occur at least once in the document. Of course, if you are writing naturally, those keywords will be there without your even thinking about keyword density and occurrences. In short, write for your readers, not for search engines.
Meta Keyword -- There is an official announcement by Google that they are no longer using the keywords meta tag in search engine ranking: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
So forget about dealing with meta keywords in your onsite SEO.
Meta description – Included in that announcement is that Google admits they are no longer using the meta description tag as a search engine ranking factor. Even big content-based websites like Wikipedia.org do not use the meta description tag.
Code to Text ratio – This is a measurement of the amount of code versus the indexable text content. Well, the ratio itself does not provide meaningful information when it comes to Google search engine rankings.
What is important is focusing on speeding up the website, which Google admits is included as a search engine ranking factor: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Do not focus on the code to text ratio, because lots of code does not imply that your website is slow. The key is code optimization (or using techniques such as Gzip compression, etc.). You can read more details here: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Speed-up-Web-Page-Loading-Using-Google-Page-Speed/
How to Get Quality Free Backlinks
As a webmaster, one of the most important factors that can have a strong effect on your website rankings in search engines is the backlinks pointing to it. Link building and earning website authority are among the most challenging webmaster activities. Still, building good backlinks can be as simple as building and maintaining good habits. Keep reading to find out how.This article does not talk about old techniques of getting links, such as reciprocal link exchange, social bookmarking, article submission, submitting links to directories, 3-way link exchange, forum posting and blog commenting. Rather, we'll examine webmaster habits, and how these habits can be used to get quality free links to your site. Some of this are not SEO techniques at all, but important habits that a webmaster must have to earn quality links for his/her website. The habits are not listed in order of importance.
Habit #1: Networking with other webmasters in the same niche
Some webmasters have a habit of networking with other webmasters. They do that for both personal and business reasons. During this process, links can be earned in a variety of ways. Other webmasters visit your website and may find an interesting topic to link to, for instance. While networking, you may discuss some of the articles on your website with a fellow webmaster; if this sparks some interest, the other webmaster will link to it and share it with his/her friends.
Further, if you've been doing this for a while and are considered an authority in your niche, you can get a lot of followers from other, fellow webmasters. In this case, you can get a lot of links because they will list your website in their blogroll or cite it in their articles.
So how are you going to acquire this helpful habit?
First, you need to socialize and be eager to meet new people. Do not do it for the sake of links; do it because you need someone that has the same interest as you, which both of you can discuss and perhaps even collaborate on articles or other projects.
You will learn a lot from these relationships. They also expose your level of skill and expertise.
You can socialize online by participating on certain kinds of websites. These include:
- Forums about your niche. For example, if you have an SEO-related website, or if you're interested in learning SEO, you can join and contribute to forums.seochat.com.
- Website communities about bloggers. A good example is blogcatalog.com, where you can submit your blog, meet some new contacts, and discuss areas of interest.
- Popular social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. These sites offer a lot of opportunities to meet new contacts and discuss similar interests.
Currently, you can earn backlinks in Facebook and Google Profiles by putting your website in one of those fields in your profile. These links are crawlable and indexable.
Of course, it would be advisable to put a strong effort into making your website as good as possible, so that visitors coming from that link become interested in your expertise and will most likely network with you.
- Networking websites such as Linkedin (http://www.linkedin.com/), where you can participate in related discussion groups.
In summary, this habit can get you free backlinks because your contacts will link to you for editorial reasons. These are also quality links, because they are both coming from related websites and editorially given. Keep developing and nurturing your website contacts. One good way is to maintain a contact list in a spreadsheet with their URLs, so that you will remember their website, subscribe to their feeds and interact with their content. You can also share what news you have in your website.
Habit #2: Answering commenter questions seriously
This habit is rare. If you read popular blogs, you'll notice that there are only a few of them that answer the commenters' questions seriously and in detail. This is particularly important if the person commenting on your article/post is asking some technical questions that need technical details.
Here are some good tips on how to transform this opportunity into a good link bait strategy:
- Moderate comments on your blog.
- Look for the commenters that are asking detailed/specific questions about your post and have received no replies. The answer to this question is either not found in your article or not clearly elaborated.
- Write a very detailed answer to his/her question by publishing it in a separate article. You can write a reply around 500 words or more, depending on the complexity of the topic.
- Let the asker know you have answered the question either by replying to his/her comment or sending an email.
- In most cases, the asker will be glad of your help and will either link to it, bookmark it or even share it with other friends.
Most likely, if the asker is also a webmaster with related websites or another blogger, you will be surprised to find that you can earn a link by featuring your detailed answer in one of his/her blog posts or resource page.
Not only you can earn a link from this technique, but you can also help your website to grow by adding more quality and useful content.
