The tips (1st part) : signification
The tip table is the action part of HTML4SEO. It is the heart of the application and then, probably the most visible part of it.
The table has, by default, 6 columns : HTML tag, Tip, Number of Urls, Relative efficiency, Difficulty and ROI. You can sort each one of these with Firefox and Opera (there is a small bug with Internet Explorer that should be fixed soon).
HTML Tag
The HTML tag column only lists the HTML tags for which a tip is proposed. Therefore, all the tags are not necesseraly included.
Tips
The Tips column tells you what to do for the corresponding HTML tag. There are 2 kinds of tips : Add N times the audited expression in the corresponding tag or remove N words except the audited expression. Applying the given tip, you will have a number of keywords and a keyword density just better than the mean level for the corresponding tag.
In the following example,
HTML4SEO proposes you to add 6 times the expression “mp3 player” (very competing keyword), and to remove 47 words except the expression “mp3 player” in the anchors (visible text from hypertext links).
As this is a hard-working task (remove 47 words…), HTML4SEO provides some alternatives. Instead of Adding 6/Remove 47, you can Add 7/Remove 34 or Add 8/Remove 21 or Add 9 remove 8 or Add 10/Remove 0. The goal is to reach the keyword density and number of keywords of the best ranked pages.
Number of Urls
The Number of Urls column is very important. It tells you the number of Urls among the top 10 that contains the expression in the corresponding tag. For a tag, The higher its value is, the most decisive its optimization will be. If this value is low, its optimization will probably have a light impact on your ranking.
By default, are only included the tags for which there are at least 2 Urls in the top 10 containing the expression.
In the following example,
Only 2 of the 10 first Urls contain the expression “mp3 player” for the B tag (text in bold). Meanwhile, all of the 10 first Urls (10/10) contain the expression “mp3 player” in the TITLE tag (which is the text shown in the title bar of your browser). The TITLE tag optimization seems to be far more decisive than the B tag’s for this expression.
Relative efficiency
The Relative efficiency column tells you about the weight of a tip. The word “relative” is important. It means that the efficiency depends on the context. The Relative efficiency value takes in account the type of the tag (Title, Meta Description, H1, A/Href, etc…), the weight of the proposed modification for the tip and the Number of Urls.
Difficulty
The Difficulty column tells you about the feasibility of a tip. In fact, applying a tip is quite easy. You just need to open your HTML editor, then… that’s not that easy.
There are tags more visible than others, just like H1 for instance. The change imply a major overhaul of the web page and requires an adjustment of the speech that can have a decisive impact especially for a promotional campaign where every word count. Similarly, the A/Href tags are quite difficult to change, as the links (outbound mainly) are independent from the linking web page. On the contrary, there are painless tags to change : Img/Alt, Meta/Keywords, etc…
The Difficulty value takes in account the type of the tag (Title, Meta Description, H1, A/Href, etc…) and the importance of the proposed modification for the tip.
ROI
The ROI column is the Return On Investment, i.e the ratio between the effort and the expected benefit.
The ROI value takes in account the Relative efficiency and the Difficulty.
In the following example,
Althought the proposed changes for the Img/Alt tag are more important than the ones for the H1 tag, its efficiency is worse.
On the contrary, the difficulty is lower for the Img/Alt tag than the H1 tag despite of the need to add more occurrencies of the expression “mp3 player”.
As the Title tag is easy to modify and has a significant ranking impact, its ROI is pretty high, which is not the case of the H1 tag since, despite of a major impact, it is very visible, so difficult to change easily.
