Right from the start, let me just tip my hat to the great folks over at Search Engine Land for this monumental creation: a periodic table of the elements that overviews SEO ranking factors. This chart is a highly visual and easy to understand catalogue of the most important factors in content writing, HTML, site architecture, linking, social, and other categories, as well as tactics to avoid.
Rather than structuring the setup as a “do this instead of that” set of directions, each helpful element on the chart has been given a positive value (typically +3, +2, or +1) while hurtful elements receive a negative value (-1, -2, or -3). The chart is divided into categories, including a division between on-site items and off-site items and a structure into sub-categories such as content, HTML, links, and so forth. Here are just a few quick examples from the chart:
- Content:
- Quality (+3): Are pages well written and have substantial quality content?
- Research (+3): Have you researched the keywords people may use to find your content?
- HTML:
- Titles (+3): Do HTML title tags contain keywords relevant to page topics?
- Description (+2): Do meta description tags describe what pages are about?
- Social:
- Reputation (+2): Do those respected on social networks share your content?
- Violations:
- Cloaking (-3): Do you show search engines different pages than humans?
I don’t necessarily agree with the weight of everything on the chart. For example, quality content is certainly far more important than a good meta title. While a title may help in initial recognition, quality content will naturally bolster your success in generating inbound links, social sharing, and far more. Still, the periodic table of SEO does hit on many of the key points.
This is an incredibly helpful resource and Search Engine Land is just giving it away. So go grab it, say thank you, and enjoy.
[via Search Engine Land]
