The tips (3rd part) : which strategy ?
The tip table is made to simplify the HTML code optimization job. Still, are you sure to obtain a real gain ? This is the purpose of this article.
What is incremental SEO ?
There are several ways to improve the ranking on a keyword, depending on the situation. If your website theme is poorly targeted, you need to work back your HTML code. This is what HTML4SEO is made for.
SEO is usually made by successive approximations, until reaching the goal. Take your distance with massive modifications of your HTML code, this could be unproductive or even harmful. It is often more profitable and easier to optimize by successive edits. If only few modifications are enough, no need to do more.
To do so, remember you can request the same audit (when payed) as many times as you want for 30 sliding days. And then, you won’t be charged for it. It means during 30 sliding days, this audit is free of charge for the same or any other web page of your choice.
For example, on september 12th 2007 you ask for an audit on the keyword “mp3 player”, on the US version of Google for your web page http://www.mywebsite.com/mp3-player.htm. Therefore, you are charged for one audit in your account.
Until october 11th 2007 included, you can ask for the same audit again (the keyword “mp3 player”, on Google US) for your web page http://www.mywebsite.com/mp3-player.htm but also for the web page http://www.mywebsite.com/win-your-mp3-player.htm and even your competitors web pages as many times as you want.
It has to be clear that the keyword (“mp3 player” here) and the search engine version (Google US here) have to be the same.
What is the optimal strategy ?
The tip table is composed of 6 columns : HTML tag,Tips, 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). The last 4 columns are more interesting to sort, each one can give way to a different strategy.
The key tags
The Number of Urls column is very important. It tells you the number of Urls among the top 10 that contain 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.
Focusing on the tags which have the best number of urls, the key tags are privileged for the targeted keyword. These tags are more difficult to find and vary a lot from one keyword to another.
From the most efficient to the least efficient
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. If your web page title is already optimized, you won’t have a tip for it, even if this tag is often decisive. The Relative efficiency value takes in account the type of the tag (Title, Meta Description, H1, A/Href, etc…), the importance of the suggested modification for the tip and the Number of Urls.
Focusing on the most efficient tags, you will reduce the number of tags to modify. However, these tags will probably be hard to edit (H1, A/Href, etc…).
Some tags (Title, H1, etc…) are often among the most efficient. This strategy is close to SEO classics.
From the easiest to the least easy
The Difficulty column tells you about the feasibility of a tip. There are tags more visible than others and so more difficult to change.
Focusing on the easiest tags often reduces the efforts to provide. This is the strategy of the least effort. However, you may have more changes to make in the future.
Maximize performance
The ROI value takes in account the Relative efficiency and the Difficulty.
Focusing on the ROI column maximizes the performance by finding the best compromise between effects (efficiency) and efforts (difficulty).
To go further
A unique SEO strategy is certainly comfortable (no personnal efforts to make) but is not necesseraly the best. The choice of strategy will depend on the context (competing keyword, niche keyword, etc…).
You also have to remind that a good optimization of your HTML code can not be reduced to only one expression. The whole theme around the expression is to optimize. The tagcloud of the Beginner tab (or the Expert tab) tells you about the main expressions found in your competitors web pages and that lack in the audited page. By clicking on the keywords that are closed to the audited expression, you will get other tips for the clicked keyword.
For example, for the keyword “rent a car”, it seems interesting to make efforts on the expressions car rental, a car and enterprise rent.
SEO must therefore be incremental in 2 levels : the first one for the main keyword (targeted on the search engine) and another one for the expressions close to the main keyword from a thematic point of view.
