3 components
The three most important components of search engine optimization are:
- Text component: Text and META-data
- Link component: Links and navigation
- Popularity component: Link Popularity and Click-Through Popularity
Pages with the best combination of components will have higher rankings then other pages. In the following chapters we will discuss them in depth
Text component
If you want good rankings in search engines, you need good content. Content is King! This also is common sense: provide your visitor with unique and quality content to serve him better. Search engines will also ‘notice’ this and rank you better. The more good content you have the higher your chance of being found. But too much content will lower the keyword density for certain words you want to optimize your page for. On average a text content of 200 till 800 words is ok. When you need more words on a page, most of your audience will not read it anyway.
Title, Meta and Alt tags
On a web page, some text can be seen as part of the visual presentation and some text is “hidden”, including META-tags, title-tags, comment-tags and ALT-tags
Search engines have reduced the amount of importance they place on META-tags, with the exception of the title-tag. More weight is placed on the visual text – the text that users will see when they arrive at the web page.
The title-tag is the most important HTML tag on your site. The title-tag displays the site’s name, which will appear in the top of the browser. All major spider-driven search engines consider the keywords found in this tag in their relevancy calculations. You should pay special attention to this tag, as it carries a lot more weight than most other objects of a web page. You can read more about how to write good title-tags in the next section.
Introducing Link component
Your site architecture and the way your links are made determines the way a robot spider or crawler can follow the links in your site. It determines the search engine saturation, de dept of crawling and more important the distribution of the PageRank between your urls in your domain.
Introducing Popularity component
The most famous popularity component is the Pagerank from google. The green bar from Google named after one of his founders Larry Page is a way to determine how popular a web page is. Its like voting: the more important votes you receive the more important your webpage is according to the Pagerank. Other off page criteria can be click popularity and the time a user visits your site.