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Title: Setting SEO Guidelines For A Single Page

Intro:

Hi and thank you for listening to SEOFightClub.org. I’m Ted Kubaitis and I have 22 years of web development and SEO experience. I have patented web technologies and started online businesses. I am both an engineer and a marketer. My goal is to help you win your SEO fights.

This episode’s FREEBIE

With every episode I love to give something away of high value. This episode’s SEO freebie is BOTH the data I collected on over 300 factors for our target search term and the 2 page template of content tuning guidelines for the search terms. So if you are an SEO data junkie like I am then this download is GOLD.

You can download the freebie at: http://seofightclub.org/episode5

In this episode I’ll be taking measurements and constructing some content tuning guidelines to tune a single page for a single keyword. Obviously you want to write quality content that will pass Google’s quality rating guidelines. Given that we all agree on that point I just want to add a few extra requirements to help ensure we are achieving competitive parity in a “full text indexing” perspective. In episode 4 “The Truth About Keyword Stuffing” we did a dive into the fundamentals of “full text indexing” and the basic problem Google is solving at its core. We learned that when all else is equal there are places on the page where whoever says it more tends to win. It was not true that stuffing your pages in general did anything for you and we know there are manual penalties for doing that, so don’t be dumb. But there is a concept of competitive parity and there are zones with a web page that appear to matter more. This isn’t my opinion but it is coming from empirical measurements and the math of statistical correlation.

To start I like to look at all the match words. The match words are the words in that Google puts in bold case in the search results to highlight them has relevant hits for your search terms. These match words are the terms that appear to be getting credit for search relevance and when I talk about matches later on these are the matches I am talking about.

Matching words for “gourmet gift baskets” search:

basket

baskets

gift

gift basket

gift baskets

giftbasket

giftbaskets

gifts

gourmet

gourmet gift baskets

gourmetgiftbaskets

Next I like to characterize the kinds of pages that are ranking well:

Ecom category pages

lots of product tokens and no comment threads

We can see right away that we should be tuning a category page for this keyword.

Next I look at what search features in the search results are we competing with:

Related Searches

Top Ads

Right Ads

Google Shopping Results

These are other channel opportunities to win the business for the traffic on this keyword. In many cases you want to be in all of these zones.

Next I start to look at competitive parity with factor measurements. I create software that measures over 300 factors for each results for your keywords. The software also computes the mathematical correlation so we have strong clues as to which factors are arguably helping our rankings the most. By bringing this kind of math and empirical method to SEO we can save a lot of time and effort and focus on the areas where there is evidence of benefit or opportunity.

Strong Correlation:

social:

social accounts in general,twitter accounts

google plus pages

facebook accounts

social pages in general

likes in facebook api

likes,shares,comments, and clicks in facebook api

comments in facebook api for the URL

shares in facebook api for the URL

plus ones in google api for the URL

matches

leading matches in web page H1 to H6 tags

Weak Correlation:

Social

instagram pages in web page

matches in web page meta og:site_name

Website Info

phone numbers in web page HTML source

terms links in web page A tags

privacy links in web page A tags

SERP Context

exact matches in Google result URL

exact matches in Google result URL

site links in Google result

Matches

matches in web page class attributes

matches in web page H4 tags

matches in web page H4-H6 tags

matches in web page H1-H6 tags

leading matches in web page H1 to H3 tags

matches in web page HTML comments

matches in web page H1-H3 tags

Page Characteristics

kilobytes in web page body tag

do follow links in web page HTML source

words in web page stripped text

internal links in web page HTML source

links in web page

kilobytes in web page stripped html text

kilobytes in web page script tags

image tags with alt text in web page

To summarize:

Very important:

Social signals,

social linking to pages and accounts,

Keyword matches in headings

Also Important:

Contact Info,

Terms of Service,

Privacy Policy,

Amount of Main Content

Images

Supplemental Content

Degree of Tuning:

Next we need to measure the “Degree of Tuning”. With a higher competition keyword you often have a larger amount of tuning required. The degree of tuning is the amount of work you need to do so your empirical measures meet or exceed your competitors. This is called “comptitive parity”. This changes from one keyword to the next so the tuning for the search term in this example might be a lot more work than you need for the tuning in your niche. Or maybe it is nowhere near enough tuning when compared to your niche. The only way to know is to make the measurements for your specific keywords.

Lets look at the degree of tuning for this example:

Social

accounts

social accounts in web page links with a value of at least 3

twitter accounts in web page links with a value of at least 1

google plus page in web page links with a value of at least 1

facebook accounts in web page links with a value of at least 1

pages

social pages in web page links with a value of at least 2

instagram pages in web page links with a value of 1

signals

likes in facebook api for the URL with a value of at least 116

likes,shares,comments, and clicks in facebook api for the URL with a value of at least 361

comments in facebook api for the URL with a value of at least 42

shares in facebook api for the URL with a value of at least 202

plus ones in google api for the URL with a value of at least 286

meta data

open graph meta tags

Matches

Headings

leading matches in web page H1 to H6 tags with a value of at least 1

leading matches in web page H1 to H3 tags with a value from 1 to 2

matches in web page H4 tags with a value of 1

matches in web page H1-H3 tags with a value from 5 to 20

Website Info

phone numbers with a value from 2 to 4

terms link with a value of 1

privacy link with a value of 1

SERP Context

exact matches in Google result URL with a value greater than 0

site links in Google result with a value of 1

page characteristics

images

image tags with alt text in web page with a value from 18 to 45

links

internal links in web page HTML source with a value from 175 to 416

links in web page with a value from 190 to 433

do follow links in web page HTML source with a value from 190 to 410

page size

words in web page stripped text with a value from 930 to 1373

kilobytes in web page stripped html text with a value from 7 to 10

kilobytes in web page body tag with a value from 85 to 171

Again these aren’t my opinions. These values were measured from the sites that were ranking for our target keyword. The math of statistical correlation told me which factors appear to be the most important. As you can probably sense already, if you measured all of this for a different keyword all these values would likely be different because people are driven to compete at different levels based on the perceived value of the keyword to their business. I can also tell you that when you change types of keywords Google treats them differently with respect to which factors are more or less important. For some search types social signals and privacy policies are critical, but for other search types different factors seem to matter more. You have to measure and calculate to know.

Finally we get to Google’s Quality Rating Guidelines. Google now tells us what they specifically like and don’t like in terms of their manual review of websites. I would wage that some of their guidelines are enforced automatically by the Google algorithms but we know at a minimum they are enforced manually by human beings who visit your site. We should consider these as well in our recommendations because doing so will help future proof the performance of our page.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.co