What SEO Factors That May Seem Obsolete Are Still in Force in 2020?

What’s SEO in the conditions of constant changes of rules and priorities? How is a website optimized today? In the following article, we’ll explain some truths and misconceptions about SEO website optimization nowadays.

What’s SEO Today?

An even more precise question – What’s SEO and what are its meaning, purpose, and importance for the success of a website? In this article, we’ll discuss current dilemmas about what SEO is today.

What SEO Websites Have Been Focusing on in the Past?

• The number of keywords on each individual page of the website,
• Ranking of each page of the website according to certain criteria,
• The amount of content on the website and its customization for search engines,
• Website positioning using various SEO techniques and tricks.

The strategy of such SEO optimization of websites was based on collecting backlinks, exchanging links on a link-to-link basis, accumulating content on the website, sharing and number of likes on social networks, mass commenting to post, receiving links, etc.

SEO techniques and tricks that made such a strategy easy to achieve had a key impact on earlier search results. The basic question was how to be first and stay first on Google.

The priorities of the old SEO website optimization were keywords, creating content subject to SEO rules, social media marketing, and analysis of the achieved rank of web pages and websites in search results.

What Does SEO Website Optimization Focus on Today?

• Longer keywords and phrases, and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords – relevant to content and users,
• Creating valuable and interesting content that meets the needs of people,
• Positioning based on the actual quality and popularity of the content,
• Using hashtags for better communication and search,
• ROI (Return on Investment) – the ratio of invested and returned.

The strategy of the new SEO optimization of websites is based on the high value of backlinks (not on quantity), acquiring unconditional links, results coming from the originality and usefulness of the content, positive user experience, communication and interaction with social network users to share values and experiences (not for links), etc.

What’s SEO Today in Terms of Priorities?

• Comprehensive analysis, monitoring, and improvement,
• Making the best possible layout of the elements on the website,
• Creating content for users (HEO – Human Engine Optimization),
• Social media and Internet marketing,
• Researching natural key phrases (sentences that people use to search).

What’s SEO in the Face of Constant Changes in Google Algorithms?

There’s no longer SEO for all time. Changes to Google algorithms are very often. Actually, Google changes the search algorithm about 500-600 times each year and uses over 3,000 different algorithms that affect website positions. Most of the changes are inconspicuous, but major updates such as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird bring significant changes to almost all search issues. There are currently 271 known algorithms that, each in its own way, have an impact on SEO.

Competitors are increasingly analyzing successful websites and trying to take their positions. The main goal of the website is still to make its offer consumed by visitors. Content, visibility, and traffic also remained important for achieving this goal. The focus is still on Google today, as 93 % of the online experience starts with Google searches.

What is SEO optimization of websites is still a matter of constant monitoring of trends, testing, and application of various SEO strategies, tactics, and the most effective techniques in building a modern website.

How Do Social Networks Affect SEO?

Social networks don’t directly affect the SEO optimization of a website, but the presence of them and active communication with followers (interaction) are extremely important for its success. We can freely say that today SM is a kind of SEO tool that contributes a lot to the conversion of visits into action that brings profit and better earnings to commercial websites.

Other people’s opinions about a website are today one of the most important factors influencing its position in search results. Search engines see such information as a kind of advice and recommendations. If someone shares a certain content of the website or follows it, it’s a message to search engines that they can freely offer it to other people.

Tip: Make sure your social media profiles have links to your website. Make authentic online connections and enable “friends“, “retweet“, “share“, and “like“ on all posts on your webpage. That way, social media will serve you as a powerful SEO tool. At the same time, you’ll better understand what the SEO of a website is all about.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a basic concept of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s important to understand how keyword density works, as it can have a direct impact on the visibility of your website’s content on search engine results pages (SERPs) and on the cost of your online marketing campaigns.

However, the relative importance of keyword density in algorithms of most search engine rankings, including Google, has changed over time, so it’s very crucial to understand how this concept will affect your SEO in the post-Panda era. For those not familiar with the Panda concept, in brief, it’s a Google algorithm update developed to reduce the visibility of low-quality content in the search results and to reward unique content. Panda was introduced in February 2011.

Be aware that having an appropriate web hosting can also significantly boost the visibility of your website in search results beyond the achievement of simple keyword research. MySQL hosting is one of the best SEO-friendly hosting services whose well-tested performance and features are related to many factors (uptime, speed, server location, security, etc.) that affect how search engines rank your website. MySQL is the most widely used open-source database engine and, when included in the hosting service, it can help optimize your rankings.

Keyword Density in Brief

Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword appears on a given webpage or to a whole set of content in the form of a ratio or percentage of the total number of words. Sometimes, this is called the keyword frequency or the frequency with which a particular keyword appears on a web page.

Keyword Density in Digits

Keyword density can be calculated as a specific digit, too – if needed. To determine the keyword density on a webpage, simply divide the number of mentions of a particular keyword by the total number of words on the page. The number obtained is the required keyword density on that page.

Advanced Way of Measuring Keyword Density

A more advanced way of measuring keyword density is TF-IDF. It’s an abbreviation for “term frequency-inverse document frequency“. The statistics that emerge by exploiting this tool are often used in finding information or extracting text as a way of determining the importance of a particular expression in a document. TF-IDF variations can be used by search engines in certain circumstances to quantify the relevance of page content to a user’s search query but, as always, many other SEO factors come into play.

Is There the Right Keyword Density for SEO?

There are no clearly defined “rules“ when it comes to keyword density, the same as with virtually all aspects of SEO. You won’t find any guidelines from Google that tell you exactly how many keywords a content should contain nor are there any numbers or statistics you can rely on to see how many keywords should or shouldn’t appear on your website.

However, there are some considerations to keep in mind that can help you ensure the optimization of your content. At the same time, it can increase the visibility of your content and also improve your audience’s overall experience.

Keyword Variations

Keyword targeting is still the basis of many of today’s SEO techniques, and one more best SEO practice you should consider is adopting keyword variations.

Keyword variations are small variations for a particular keyword. For example, let’s assume that you search for used cars for sale. You may use search terms other than “used cars for sale“ when trying to find a dealer. You can use “pre-owned vehicles for sale“ or some other terms, but only those that are closely related search terms.

The intent of the keyword behind these searches is the same – the user wants to find and, probably, buy a used car – but the keywords themselves can be quite different. That’s why it’s important to target keyword variations, as it anticipates the many ways a potential customer can find your business during a Google search, maximizing potential visibility for highly commercial queries.

However, the concept of keyword variations is also very nuanced, which can lead to mistakes and missed opportunities if they are mishandled.

By itself, the variant of keywords, let’s say – “cheap hotels in Miami“, “cheap hotels in Los Angeles“ and so on – aren’t “bad“ keywords per se. They can still be relevant and useful, as they would be for those looking for accommodation in larger cities around the world. However, they can be harmful if crammed into a website. This means that you need to be careful and judicious when deciding to include keyword variations in your content.

In short, you can and should use keyword variations on individual webpages and across the website to maximize visibility and reach the widest – and most relevant – audience, but you should still target only one keyword by 200-word copy.

Keyword Clustering

When it comes to Google’s search algorithm, relevance is crucial. While it’s important to avoid overflowing web pages with keywords, Google’s algorithms are believed to “search“ for groups of semantically related keywords in web content for contextual clues as to what that content is and what it does. This is what lies in the basis of the concept known as “keyword clustering“.

When Google spiders – software programs that crawl and index web pages – come across keywords on a web page, they often contextualize the keywords in relation to the content that surrounds them. This means that Google already “expects“ certain keywords to be present related to other keywords. As such, “grouping“ relevant keywords can be a very effective way to increase visibility.

For example, we could search Google to find the highest mountain peaks in Switzerland. The best result of organic search, as it often happens, is the entry of Wikipedia for the list of the highest mountain peaks in Switzerland, thanks to the extremely strong link profile of Wikipedia.

But, let’s say, you work as a tourism content manager. You want to make a blog post about the highest mountains in your country, so you write a list of the highest mountains in that country. Google already “knows“ which these mountains are, so Google “expects“ these keywords to appear in content about the highest mountains in your country.

Since an article like this is usually structured as a list that usually includes several other mountains, Google can also search for these contextually relevant keywords in this content, as these keywords are often “grouped“ together. Incorporating other unique but closely relevant keywords into clusters like this can be a great way to improve the relevance and therefore, the visibility of your content.

Use Data, Don’t Assume

As with almost everything in the world of SEO, when making decisions about keyword targeting, including keyword density, it’s crucial to use data, not assumptions. Be sure to test the copy, content, and ads on the website to make sure you don’t intentionally harm its visibility or the visibility of the ad in search results.

If you notice a drop in traffic or in a share of impressions, run A/B tests of your content and copy (observe how one version of a piece of marketing content performs alongside another) to see if reducing keyword density improves your ranking.