Increase Your Digital Visibility with SEO
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving
your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your
business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your pages have in
search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing
customers to your business.
Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site
to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Think of the index
as a giant library where a librarian can pull up a book (or a web page) to help you find exactly
what you’re looking for at the time.
Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or
signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query. In
our library analogy, the librarian has read every single book in the library and can tell you
exactly which one will have the answers to your questions.
Our SEO success factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. It’s how
search bots estimate exactly how well a website or web page can give the searcher what
they’re searching for.
Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings,
which means SEO experts have to put in the work. That’s where we come in.
Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors organizes the factors into six main categories and weights
each based on its overall importance to SEO. For example, content quality and keyword
research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and speed are important site
architecture factors.
The newly updated SEO Periodic Table also includes a list of Toxins that detract from SEO best
practices. These are shortcuts or tricks that may have been sufficient to guarantee a high
ranking back in the day when the engines’ methods were much less sophisticated. And, they
might even work for a short time now — at least until you’re caught.
We’ve also got a brand new Niches section that deep-dives into the SEO success factors
behind three key niches: Local SEO, News/Publishing, and e-commerce SEO. While our overall
SEO Periodic Table will help you with the best practices, knowing the nuances of SEO for each
of these Niches can help you succeed in search results for your small business, recipe blog,
and/or online store.
The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages and provide users
with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these factors in mind
can help your pages rank higher in the search results.