Picture the Art and Science of SEO

Mike Siers - June 10, 2011

I love it when art and science come together. Maybe that is why I am so enthusiastic about SEO and the possibilities of the internet in general. Case in point, the other day I found the periodic table of SEO, courtesy of Search Engine Land. What this little piece of scientific art is showing is a formula for SEO success, based on ranking factors that search engines look for when crawling your website.

The table highlights fundamental ranking factors for on-site and off-site optimization strategies. Likewise, the document sheds light into search engine violations and any blocking by users, via Google’s newly released hiding feature.

The table offers a numerical breakdown of the factors in the upper right-hand corner of each element — a spinoff of the traditional Periodic Table. The numbers (1-3) are meant to indicate the level of importance of each element with “1” being least important and “3” representing the highest.

Some of the listed elements are as follows:

On-Page SEO Ranking Factors:

–  Content Quality and Research — are your pages well written and has keyword research been done?
–  HTML Tiles, Description, and Keywords (Meta Data) — does your meta data contain the keywords and do they describe the page?

Off-Page SEO Ranking Factors:

–  Link Quality — are your links from trusted and reputable websites?
–  Trust/Authority — do your links and shares make your site trustworthy?

Violations:

–  Thin Content — is you content more generic and lacking substance?
–  Keyword Stuffing — are you excessively stuffing keywords in your content?

This document is both extremely informative and creative. The challenge is following it and optimizing your website to the letter. That, like the SEO document, is both an art and a science.