The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
SEO is ever-changing and evolving, with each new year that passes. More ranking factors come into play, but there are always constants in SEO. These constants are high quality, unique, relevant, and knowledgeable content. Your content should serve some purpose to the reader.
If you write about something that no one wants to read, your content is not going to rank. If you write poorly, with spelling errors, incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, or paragraphs and blog posts that make no sense at all, the ranking factors for your website are going to suffer.
SEO is about writing to the people, for the people, and because of the people. The idea of SEO ranking and any algorithm produced by search engines: Write content for people, not for search engines, and not for bots. You want to be the content someone is looking for because they will be engaged in your content. Having people come to your website to read your content who have no interest is guaranteed bounce rates. It is more important to have people reading your content who want to be there.
If you write high quality content that people want to read, acquire the patience for search engines and people to discover your content, and also promote your content in a generous and genuine way, the rewards of SEO will be satisfying.
This infographic examines the SEO year of 2014.
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Based on Rank Correlations and Averages of Top Ten
SEO Rank Correlations and 2014 Ranking Factors Study
Use this guide to survive and thrive in a constantly changing SEO world.
Good rankings are based on many factors, but the study revealed that nothing is more important to optimal SEO as high quality, relevant content. Whether that means providing more onpage material, extending keywords into entire phrases, or pertinent topics or keeping your technology up-to-date, without compelling content, you can kiss SEO goodbye.
Survival Tip #1: Increase User-Relevant Content
Content Factors That Increased From Last Year In Top Ranking URLs
8,313 Length in Text (in characters) 975 word count
TRY
Semantically comprehensive wording
Higher word counts using relevant topic terms
Provide other media such as images & videos
Fact:130 Average number of internal links of URLs ranking in the top ten
Expanding keywords in a copy with reference to other relevant terms as people are search entire topics instead of content optimized for single keywords
Fact: Using relevant terms in website content is probably one of the most important SEO Ranking Factors
PASS
Advertising: People want holistic content. Adlinks were rare on top ranking pages.
Fact: Adlinks (Adsense too) both coorelate negative with good rankings and decrease overall in the top 30.
Keyword-Stuffing – Though keywords remain important onpage elements, their appearance as exact terms decreases.
SEARCHMETRICS HINTS Existence of Proof (Must-Have) and further relevant Terms according to word co-occurrence analyses HOLISTIC and RELEVANT CONTENT
Survival Tip #2: Create Robust Site Architecture
Increasing Technical Factors of Top Ten Ranking URLs
0.99 Seconds Sitespeed 98% URLs that have a Meta Description
TRY
Including a well balance amount of good internal links
36 Average length of a top ten URL (in characters)
Keeping short loading times
Keeping the site up-to-date
Maintaining presence of all relevant Metas (like Title & Description)
Fact: 2,900 The average Search Volume of Domain Name (domain.tld)
PASS
Loose Focus
Do not focus only on technical aspects of your site. Having lots of backlinks and fast loading spee dmeans nothing if you offer no relevant content to the user.
SEARCHMETRICS HINT
Become a brand. In niches and/or the long tail, small brands can often take first spots on a SERP with their homepage, specific URLs, and/or their Wikipedia entry.
Fact: For search engines, likes, tweets, plus ones, etc. are primary signals
PASS
Using only social media to improve your ranking
Social strengths barely influences rankings. Yet, correlations are still high though they have decreased from 2013.
Survival Tip #5: Implement User Signals, They Are Crucial
Important User Signals of Top Ten
Important User Signals of Top Ten Ranking URLs
101 Seconds Time on Site
37% Bounce Rate
Fact: The highest ranking URL has a Click-Through-Rate (CTR) of 32% The 10th highest ranking URL has a CTR of 3%.
How to read & interpret the chart
How did we get these results?
We gathered approximately 300,000 URLs with top search result positions (top 30) for 10,000 informational keywords.
To determine why these URLs ranked at the top, we examined the presence and extent of certain factors.
Our results are displayed by how these factors correlate with Google rankings – without necessarily implying causation.
Math
The numbers are based on the respective average value for the TOP 10 rankings regarding each specific feature.
What is a “Spearman Rank Correlation”?
A statistical measure using ranks to calculate correlation between two sets of variables. If one variable changes, it also changes the second variable because they are correlated. Rank Correlation is used here to describe differences between entities (here: URLs) and is not to be substituted by causation. For example, “relevant terms” used in website content was found to be the feature with the highest correlation with rankings.
Click-Through Rate 0.67 Relevant Terms 0.34 Google + 1 0.33 Number of Backlinks* .031 Facebook Shares 0.28 Facebook Total 0.28 Facebook Comments 0.27 Pinterest 0.27 SEO-Visibility of backlinking URL* 0.26 Facebook Likes 0.25 Tweets 0.241 % Backlinks rel=nofollow 0.23 Proof Terms[1] 0.21 New Backlinks[1] 0.20 Backlinks from News Domains[1] 0.20 % Backlinks with Keyword 0.17 % Backlinks with Anchor-domain.tld 0.16 Number of internal Links 0.16 % Backlinks with Stopword 0.16 Keywords in Body 0.15 HTML Length 0.14 Text Character Length* 0.13 Word Count 0.13 Sitespeed 0.11 Keyword in external Links* 0.11 Word Count in Anchor Text 0.11 Position of Keyword in Title (Character) 0.10 Length of URL 0.10 Position of Keyword in Title (Word) 0.10 Keyword in internal Links 0.10 Time on Site 0.0209 Number of external Links 0.08 % Backlinks from same Country 0.07 H2 0.07 Image Count* 0.06 H1 0.06 Description 0.06 Video Integration 0.06 Bounce Rate 0.04 Keyword in Title* 0.02 Keyword in H2* 0.02 Keyword in Description* 0.01 URL is no Subdomain 0.00 -0.01 Title Character Length -0.01 Keyword in URL -0.02 Keyword in Domain Name -0.03 Adsense Blocks -0.03 Keyword in H1* -0.03 AdLinks -0.03 AdSense -0.03 AdLinks (without Adsense)
User Signals
Social
Backlinks
Onpage (technical)
Onpage (content)
*calculation modified [1] … to homepage
No reading list is complete without Serchmetrics’ 2014 Ranking Factors Study. Get it. Learn it. Survive.
![2014 SEO Ranking Factors Study [Infographic]](https://cdn.confessionsoftheprofessions.com/infographics/seo-ranking-factors-2014-infographic.jpg)
