Is this what Google will use instead of the PageRank algorithm?

Google recently announced that the PageRank toolbar won't be updated anymore. Does this mean that Google won't use PageRank as a ranking factor anymore? A Google patent that was granted in September indicates that Google might use some kind of PageRank 2.0 to rank pages.

New methods that Google uses to rank web pages

Google's new patent with the name "Onsite and offsite search ranking results" lists several on-site and off-site factors that Google might use to rank web pages. This could be something like PageRank 2.0.

1.       On-site data that Google might use

On-site data is data that can be retrieved from the analyzed web page and the complete website. According to the patent, Google might consider this information:

•             The frequency of the searched keyword on the web page or website.

•             The location of the searched keyword on the page.

•             The placement of the web page in the structure of the web site. For example, the home page might  be regarded as more important than a page the requires several clicks before it can be viewed.

•             How often a web page is linked from other pages of the same website.

2.       Off-site data that Google might use

In addition to on-site data, Google also uses off-site data to determine the position of a website. Off-site data refers to ranking signals that can be identified without accessing the web page:

•             The number of links to a page or website from other websites.

•             The number of times a web page has been clicked in the search results for a particular keyword.

•             Other statistical data about the relevance of a site.

•             Topical relevance to other sites: if many sites that are relevant to the keyword link to the same site, the linked site becomes more relevant.

•             Authoritative relevance to other site: the number of links to the site can indicate a high authority of the site. Websites with a high level of authority could be trusted more.

•             Web pages that have links from websites with high authority get a higher authority than websites that are linked from sites with less authority.

•             According to the patent, websites with a higher number of links get a higher authority.

Basics of On-Page Search Engine Optimization

The purpose why website owners engage in search engine optimization or SEO is to have their websites on the top positions of Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs. This can be done for specific keywords and is grouped into two categories: on-page and off-page optimization. The latter can be achieved by creating back links to the website. The link will help you increase your site reputation and is very crucial for landing in the first page in search results. But the basic element of optimization is the page itself. The on-page optimization is an integral part of search engine optimization because it is the one that describes the content of the website and emphasizes the main keyword you are targeting.

It starts with the identification of keywords

When it comes to SEO, the very first thing you need to do is to pick your keyword. You need to look for targeted words or phrases that are connected to your website or your business. By doing this, you will achieve high search volume. As a rule, you need to optimize each page for only one keyword since the main goal of SEO is to highlight a specific keyword in order to relay a message to your visitors and to the search engine what your site is offering. Aside from this, SEO will guide you in reaching the top position in search results for your keyword. On-page optimization is actually a no-brainer and website owner can achieve the search results position they desire given the right moves.

Rights ways in using keywords

To be successful in on-page search engine optimization, you need to put the main keyword at relevant visible and invisible (Meta) page elements. The best thing to do is to include informative, entertaining and readable content so your visitors can know what your website is all about and can easily find the information they need. Your quality content should also mention your keyword at least 2 to 4 times. Once you have written your website's content with your targeted keyword, you also need to think of a page title that will also contain the keyword. Then, add a few header tags (h1, h2, h3, and so on) in order to label paragraphs. And lastly, it is crucial to be careful when using your keyword. Check the word frequency in order to avoid the excessive usage of the word. As mentioned, 2 or 4 mentions would be sufficient.

Doing all these will not automatically put you on the first page of search engines. Google in particular like clear pages that are informative and easy to navigate. The latter can be achieved with the simple menu from which you can reach any page on the website in just one or two clicks.

The purpose of search engine optimization is to tell everyone what your website is really about. For websites engaged in business, search engine optimization will help them get as many traffic as possible. The number of visitors of the website will equate to the success of their business. Optimization is a cost effective way of introducing your products and services online. If you are really interested in performing SEO on your business or personal website, then it is advised that you follow the right techniques and practices in search engine optimization.

Basic Ways on How to Evaluate Keywords For Search Engine Optimization

In search engine optimization (SEO) and the pursuit of getting a good chunk of the market, keywords play an important role. Properly selected keywords define the direction of an online campaign. And the company and the organization that can efficiently target the right keywords searched by the target market are the ones that survive in the highly competitive internet market. This is the reason why major companies have expanded their advertising efforts online in order to tap what the consumers are looking for. But getting the best and the most efficient keywords is not an easy task; there is a science in selecting the most appropriate keywords and not all keywords and phrases are best used and utilized in an internet marketing campaign. If you are at this stage of planning, it's best that you should be aware of the best ways on how to evaluate the relevancy and the possible effective of the short-listed keywords. Listed below are some suggestions on how to evaluate keywords at least in the context of search engine optimization.

Do an internal assessment

Are the shortlisted keywords relevant and related to the actual content and focus of the website? Or will the consumers and internet users find exactly what they are looking for in the website after they have clicked on the provide link? If you say yes to two basic questions, then you are on the right track and you have targeted generally the right keywords for your campaign. 

Do a check of the keywords in search engines

If a check with the search engines reveals that there are associated advertisements to the keywords that you have selected, then it means that the keywords are highly valued in the industry and online. And you are on the right track as well in identifying keywords that can deliver financially. 

Another good strategy to use is to purchase a small campaign at Google. You can choose specific keywords for your campaign and link these keywords to the most relevant page in your website. Now what you should do is to monitor the kind of traffic that the specific page is getting. The data that have been gathered should be used and tabulated in order to come up with estimates as to how effective the keywords are. For example, if for the past day the webpage received 1,000 impressions or clicks, and of that number 100 actually visited the site, and 1 internet user have converted to sales say $10. Then this means that every visitor attracted to the keyword selected is valued at around $.01. And in order to compare the value of the keywords, test another keyword by using the actual process and theoretically compute for the amount per visitor. The one with the higher valuation is of course the better keyword for the campaign online. 

These are basic and rough suggestions on how to value the keywords on hand. There are other advanced ways too, and these are often used by big businesses that truly put all time and effort on search engine optimization and keyword research. And most of the time, these advanced ways on how to test the value of keywords will come with online tools and software thus can be costly. But the results are helpful of course to the marketers willing to realize the value of their keywords.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

SEO is an ongoing process and, if you invest the necessary resources and time, it can bring the expected benefits. You can grow your popularity and brand in the online environment and, what’s most important for your business; it can increase sales or obtain contracts for the services that you provide.

However, this is not the only advantage that you can obtain through the SEO process. You can manage your online reputation, a very important thing nowadays, considering the great development of social networks and the amount of information you can learn about a person only by searching their brand name on Google. 

Here are 10 professional tips for your online reputation management.

1. Create A Presence On Any And All Relevant Web Properties

Your company should already have Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts, at minimum. If you’re in a highly competitive market and vertical, you may need to be active on some additional social media sites, as well — there are dozens available, some of which may be specific to your industry. For many B2B, high-tech and/or professional types of businesses, having executives and employees integrate with LinkedIn may be valuable. For visually-oriented products, using Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr may be needed. And, most businesses will benefit from some number of videos shared through sites such as YouTube and Vimeo.

2. Don’t Neglect Your Social Media Accounts

It’s important to build out your social media accounts. Merely having a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ account/page for your business is insufficient — you need to develop your audience on them, too. With ongoing development, you can build your social media accounts in order to interact with customers and to increase your influence and engagement scores. If you don’t do this, those accounts may not be strong enough to outrank the postings if someone begins to post negative things. While we don’t know precisely how Google and Bing may assess the strength of social media accounts, you can use some independent scoring utilities to assess whether you’re achieving growth. Two of the better-known ones are Klout and Kred.

3. Consider Your Brands and Products

 

You may need to build out online materials and social profiles for more than just your company name. If you have brand and product names beyond your company name, you likely ought to develop content to rank for those names as well. You may need to develop websites, web pages, social media profiles and collateral materials just to claim and reserve each brand name.

4. Protect Individuals Associated With The Business

Develop a strong social media presence for your founders’, owners’, or executives’ names, particularly if they are distinctive. As I described above, keeping a low online profile to preserve your privacy just leaves you wide open for any drive-by defamers! There are quite a few businesses where the company’s identity is fairly entangled with their executives, and a solid reputation management strategy is vital for these. Consumers often search by name for doctors, dentists, and lawyers (to name a few), so create collateral to rank for these individuals if they don’t already have any.

5. Implement Authorship Where Applicable

I declared Authorship to be my top marketing tactic of 2013, and it’s still a significant advantage when done properly. This is primarily for businesses where a founder/proprietor is closely associated with the business’s identity. Google requires authors to be individuals; thus, the author tag must be associated with an individual Google+ profile, not with a business page. Using the author tag assumes you’ll be doing some ongoing publishing of articles or blog posts over time or else it’s not worthwhile — which leads us to the next point.

6. Blog

I’m serious! I’ve called blogging a secret weapon for local SEO because it helps with a site’s rankings on good keywords (if done properly) and provides fodder for one’s social media accounts. For reputation purposes, it not only can rank for your name, it can give you a solid “home court” ground where you can directly respond to any major assertions made about your company if necessary.

7. Listen

When responding to online complaints or bad reviews, seriously consider that there may be some weaknesses in your process that need to be addressed — particularly if you get frequent negative feedback about a specific thing. Remember the adage that “the customer is always right”? Don’t be inflexible; come up with a creative way to give customers what they’re wanting without creating friction. I’ve seen business processes that just seemed dumb, or service fees that just made customers feel like they’ve been gouged. Just because you can pressure people into paying more doesn’t mean that you should. Consider that you could be driving existing or potential customers into the arms of your competitor. The extra money you make on that annoying fee could be cancelled out by business lost from those who see numerous complaints about it online.

8. Apologize

If you or your company messes up, fails or otherwise does something wrong, own up to it — and make a genuine apology to those who have been affected. Being real and transparent in apologizing can go far toward diffusing a situation and moving the process along toward reconciliation or, at least, toward making a crisis situation come to a close. If you do it, make sure the apology is authentic — don’t do one of those weaselly, “I’m sorry you allowed my actions to make you feel bad” statements that are disingenuous nonsense. Also, try to make amends in some way, unconditionally.

9. Don’t Get Into Online Arguments

It’s very easy to get sucked into this — but even if you’re technically right, you might lose out overall by just coming across as petty, harsh or unprofessional. Worse yet, you might actually be wrong… and once you get emotionally riled up, you could end up saying and doing things that damage your reputation. (For a dramatic example, read about the epic Facebook meltdown of a husband-wife restaurateur team.) The best approach is to diffuse situations and take communications offline to try to reconcile. Be nicer in your online interactions than you even think you need to be. Your professional responses may win more customers than being “right” in an online disagreement. Feel yourself getting drawn into escalating conflict? Walk away from your computer.

10. Make The Investment

Reputation development requires an investment, both in time and money. Most small, local businesses are either ignoring proactive reputation management or they are doing it themselves, on a shoestring, and on an as-needed and as-they-have-time-to-do-it basis. I’d argue that social media and proactive reputation management should be considered vital elements, not nice-to-haves. Further, if you don’t have experience in interacting with online communities, doing it yourself may not be good enough or may exacerbate any issues that can arise. So, make the investment — and if you don’t have the time to do it, don’t know how, or just aren’t getting the job done, hire someone to handle it for you.

More than Keywords: 7 Concepts of Advanced On-Page SEO

As marketers, helping search engines answer that basic question is one of our most important tasks. Search engines can't read pages like humans can, so we incorporate structure and clues as to what our content means. This helps provide the relevance element of search engine optimization that matches queries to useful results.

Understanding the techniques used to capture this meaning helps to provide better signals as to what our content relates to, and ultimately helps it to rank higher in search results. This post explores a series of on-page techniques that not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.

While Google doesn't reveal the exact details of its algorithm, over the years we've collected evidence from interviews, research papers, US patent filings and observations from hundreds of search marketers to be able to explore these processes. Special thanks to Bill Slawski, whose posts on SEO By the Sea led to much of the research for this work.

As you read, keep in mind these are only some of the ways in which Google could determine on-page relevancy, and they aren't absolute law! Experimenting on your own is always the best policy.

We'll start with the simple, and move to the more advanced.

1. Keyword Usage

In the beginning, there were keywords. All over the page.

The concept was this: If your page focused on a certain topic, search engines would discover keywords in important areas. These locations included the title tag, headlines, alt attributes of images, and throughout in the text. SEOs helped their pages rank by placing keywords in these areas.

Even today, we start with keywords, and it remains the most basic form of on-page optimization.

Most on-page SEO tools still rely on keyword placement to grade pages, and while it remains a good place to start, research shows its influence has fallen. 

While it's important to ensure your page at a bare minimum contains the keywords you want to rank for, it is unlikely that keyword placement by itself will have much of an influence on your page's ranking potential.

2. TF-IDF

It's not keyword density, it's term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). 

Google researchers recently described TF-IDF as "long used to index web pages" and variations of TF-IDF appear as a component in several well-known Google patents.

TF-IDF doesn't measure how often a keyword appears, but offers a measurement of importance by comparing how often a keyword appears compared to expectations gathered from a larger set of documents.

If we compare the phrases "basket" to "basketball player" in Google's Ngram viewer, we see that "basketball player" is a more rare, while "basket" is more common. Based on this frequency, we might conclude that "basketball player" is significant on a page that contains that term, while the threshold for "basket" remains much higher.

For SEO purposes, when we measure TF-IDF's correlation with higher rankings, it performs only moderately better than individual keyword usage. In other words, generating a high TF-IDF score by itself generally isn't enough to expect much of an SEO boost. Instead, we should think of TF-IDF as an important component of other more advanced on-page concepts. 

3. Synonyms and Close Variants

With over 6 billion searches per day, Google has a wealth of information to determine what searchers actually meanwhen typing queries into a search box. Google's own research shows that synonyms actually play a role in up to70% of searches.

To solve this problem, search engines possess vast corpuses of synonyms and close variants for billions of phrases, which allows them to match content to queries even when searchers use different words than your text. An example is the query dog pics, which can mean the same thing as:

• Dog Photos   • Pictures of Dogs   • Dog Pictures   • Canine Photos   • Dog Photographs

On the other hand, the query Dog Motion Picture means something else entirely, and it's important for search engines to know the difference.

From an SEO point of view, this means creating content using natural language and variations, instead of employing the same strict keywords over and over again.

Using variations of your main topics can also add deeper semantic meaning and help solve the problem ofdisambiguation, when the same keyword phrase can refer to more than one concept. Plant and factory together might refer to a manufacturing plant, whereas plant and shrub refer to vegetation.

Today, Google's Hummingbird algorithm also uses co-occurrence to identify synonyms for query replacement.

Under Hummingbird, co-occurrence is used to identify words that may be synonyms of each other in certain contexts while following certain rules according to which, the selection of a certain page in response to a query where such a substitution has taken place has a heightened probability. 

Bill Slawski - SEO by the Sea

4. Page Segmentation

Where you place your words on a page is often as important as the words themselves.

Each web page is made up of different parts—headers, footers, sidebars, and more. Search engines have long worked to determine the most important part of a given page. Both Microsoft and Google hold several patentssuggesting content in the more relevant sections of HTML carry more weight.

Content located in the main body text likely holds more importance than text placed in sidebars or alternative positions. Repeating text placed in boilerplate locations, or chrome, runs the risk of being discounted even more.

Page segmentation becomes significantly more important as we move toward  mobile devices, which often hide portions of the page. Search engines want to serve users the portion of your pages that are visible and important, so text in these areas deserves the most focus.

To take it a step further, HTML5 offers addition semantic elements such as

,

, and

, which can clearly define sections of your webpage.

5. Semantic Distance and Term Relationships

When talking about on-page optimization, semantic distance refers to the relationships between different words and phrases in the text. This differs from the physical distance between phrases, and focuses on how terms connect within sentences, paragraphs, and other HTML elements.

How do search engines know that "Labrador" relates to "dog breeds" when the two phrases aren't in the same sentence?

Search engines solve this problem by measuring the distance between different words and phrases within different HTML elements. The closer the concepts are semantically, the closer the concepts may be related. Phrases located in the same paragraph are closer semantically than phrases separated by several blocks of text.

Additionally, HTML elements may shorten the semantic distance between concepts, pulling them closer together. For example, list items can be considered equally distant to one another, and "the title of a document may be considered to be close to every other term in document".

Now is a good time to mention Schema.org. Schema markup provides a way to semantically structureportions of your text in a manner that explicitly define relationship between terms.

The great advantage schema offers is that it leaves no guesswork for the search engines. Relationships are clearly defined. The challenge is it requires webmasters to employ special markup. So far, studies show low adoption. The rest of the concepts listed here can work on any page containing text.

6. Co-occurrence and Phrase-Based Indexing

Up to this point, we've discussed individual keywords and relationships between them. Search engines also employ methods of indexing pages based on complete phrases, and also ranking pages on the relevance of those phrases.

We know this process as phrase-based indexing.

What's most interesting about this process is not how Google determines the important phrases for a webpage, but how Google can use these phrases to rank a webpage based on how relevant they are.

Using the concept of co-occurrence, search engines know that certain phrases tend to predict other phrases. If your main topic targets "John Oliver," this phrase often co-occurs with other phrases like "late night comedian," "Daily Show," and "HBO." A page that contains these related terms is more likely to be about "John Oliver" than a page that doesn't contain related terms.

Add to this incoming links from pages with related, co-occurring phrases and you've given your page powerful contextual signals.

7. Entity Salience

Looking to the future, search engines are exploring ways of using relationships between entities, not just keywords, to determine topical relevance.

One technique, published as a Google research paper, describes assigning relevance through entity salience.

Entity salience goes beyond traditional keyword techniques, like TF-IDF, for finding relevant terms in a document by leveraging known relationships between entities. An entity is anything in the document that is distinct and well defined.

The stronger an entity's relationship to other entities on the page, the more significant that entity becomes.

In the diagram above, an article contains the topics Iron Man, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and Science Fiction. The phrase "Marvel Comics" has a strong entity relationship to all these terms. Even it only appears once, it's likelysignificant in the document. 

On the other hand, even though the phrase "Cinerama" appears multiple times (because the film showed there), this phrase has weaker entity relationships, and likely isn't as significant.

Practical tips for better on-page optimization

As we transition from keyword placement to more advanced practices of topic targeting, it's actually easy to incorporate these concepts into our content. While most of us don't have the means available to calculate semantic relationships and entity occurrences, there are a number of simple steps we can take when crafting optimized content:

1. Keyword research forms your base. Even though individual keywords themselves are no longer enough to form the foundation of your content, everything begins with good keyword research. You want to know whatterms you are targeting, the relative competition around those keywords, and the popularity of those terms. Ultimately, your goal is to connect your content with the very keywords people type and speak into the search box.
   
2. Research around topics and themes. Resist researching single keywords, and instead move towards exploring your keyword themes. Examine the secondary keywords related to each keyword. When people talk about your topic, what words do they use to describe it? What are the properties of your subject? Use these supporting keyword phrases as cast members to build content around your central theme.
   
3. When crafting your content, answer as many questions as you can. Good content answers questions, and semantically relevant content reflects this. A top ranking for any search query means the search engine believes your content answers the question best. As you structure your content around topics and themes, make sure you deserve the top ranking by answering the questions and offering a user experience better than the competition.
   
4. Use natural language and variations. During your keyword research process, it's helpful to identify other common ways searchers refer to your topic, and include these in your content when appropriate. Semantic keyword research is often invaluable to this process.
   
5. Place your important content in the most important sections. Avoid footers and sidebars for important content. Don't try to fool search engines with fancy CSS or JavaScript tricks. Your most important content should go in the places where it is most visible and accessible to readers. 
   
6. Structure your content appropriately. Headers, paragraphs, lists, and tables all provide structure to content so that search engines understand your topic targeting. A clear webpage contains structure similar to a good university paper. Employ proper introductions, conclusions, topics organized into paragraphs, spelling and grammar, and cite your sources properly.

At the end of the day, we don't need a super computer to make our content better, or easier to understand. If we write like humans for humans, our content goes a long way in becoming optimized for search engines. What are your best tips for on-page SEO and topic targeting?