You may have heard that Google has revamped its search engine algorithms over time, which expand into over 10,000 sub-signals. You may ever heard that Google doesn’t count Facebook Likes as SEO juice (for some people who believe, maybe it does). Whatever you’ve heard or whatever your SEO skill level, there’s a good chance you’ve found yourself at some point overwhelmed trying to keep track of it all.
Today, we present a periodic table on how SEO factors of a searchengine (especially Google). The goal of this table is not to list all of the two hundred factors and be precise about how each of those factors works. No one actually knows the exact answers on that. Even if they did, the “recipe” or “algorithm” used to mix all these factors together and decide what pages to rank best changes all the time.
This table is designed to help you focus on the most important areas that have the biggest impact on rankings and search engine visibility. If you are unfamiliar with search engine optimisation, this table is a good framework to begin. If you are an SEO expert, it is a nice reminder of many essential things.
For instance, it’s not about whether Google+ shares count more than Facebook Likes, since search engines are considering social likes overall. So, generating social signals overall will help generally with SEO efforts. Another example: It is not about whether using a term you want to be found for carries more weight if used at the beginning of an HTML title tag rather than at the end. It’s about the general idea that having terms you want to be found for in your HTML title tags anywhere is generally helpful.
Understanding The Table
The table contains 33 factors and all of these are among the most important things. Still, we’ve also tried to show within this group which ones carry the most weight. These are shown with a +3 next to them, and they are also more darkly colored that the other factors. Just below are the +2 factors, then the +1 factors. There are also negative factors, things that should be avoided, as they can harm your visibility. Factors marked -3 are considered the worst ones, then -2 and -1.
Again, all these factors are important. The weightings are general guides, and it’s also important to understand that the factors can work together. A page with several minor positive factors might outrank one with a single positive factor. Similarly, a single negative factor might not mean a site is never to be found. Each factor has a two letter symbol. The first letter represents the category of elements the factor is part of, such as C for Content. The second letter represents the element itself, such as q for Quality, giving Cq its symbol. Violations are unique in that they all begin with V regardless of what category they are in, so that they can more easily be identified as violations.
