SEO Techniques to Improve Search Engine Rankings

What are some advanced SEO techniques that you can implement to polish your websites’ search engine presence? For starters you could use keyword to content continuity; inbound anchor text to deep link mapping, internal link augmentation and sitemaps to push a few competitors off the page while scaling the search engine result pages.

SEO Techniques to Improve Search Engine Rankings

SEO Technique#1: Mapping Term Weights to Landing Pages

Keyword to content continuity – Term frequency dictates that the more relevant content you have about a topic within your website, the higher chance search engine spiders will latch on to it when they observe your pages as “a bag of words” and reverse the funnel of your site for relevance and look at “global term weights” in contrast to the volume and prominence of your content.

For example 100 pages of relevant content sparsely covering a topic versus 2 pages of relevant content about a topic each have different results in the SERPs (search engine result pages) when you start mapping out deep links (inbound links from other sites to pages other than your homepage) and selecting a “preferred landing page” to promote as the champion page for specific search engine rankings.

You can either (1) concentrate ranking factor across several pages for long-tail domination (such as each page ranking for an array of keywords) or (2) create more compelling in depth content (such as 10 solid pages of content based on the keyword/topic) and then use those 10 pages to consolidate the rankings for a more competitive array of laser-like keywords (only focusing on top level root phrases and keyword).

Ideally, each page should be viewed as a solution to a potential problem or serve as a landing page that can either (a) provide insight (b) solve a problem or provide educational value or (c) convert a prospect or act as a springboard to another page that is more defined and capable of accomplishing conversion.

Having said that, you need to determine the barrier to entry for each keyword you are targeting and then provide ample content within your own website to provide a foundation for current and future rankings. This can be done from extracting data from competitors websites (yet that is another post in itself), yet once accomplished, you then have a blueprint to start scaling your internal relevance model that you can then use in tandem with deep link mapping.

SEO Technique#2: Providing Sustenance to Landing Pages

Deep Link Mapping – Deep links are links to specific pages within your website. Although the homepage serves as a catchall, it is not the best place for conversion.  This is one reason why so many people just fork over thousands of dollars for PPC since they know that traffic from visitors has a higher conversion rate when they land on pages specifically crafted to appease the educational or commerce based solution that the person using those keywords is seeking.

Through mapping out user intent with an array of predetermined keywords, this puts you in a unique opportunity to (a) match user expectation and (b) elevate specific pages in your website to satisfy their needs. The solution is through providing a plethora of deep links by varying the anchor text and volume of anchors to the respective landing pages.

Granted, each page has a different threshold, for example a page with 50,000 competing pages or less should only require 3-5 links from external websites mapped specifically to the most relevant landing page within your website.

Pages with 100,000 competing pages (“use quotes” around keyword in Google and conduct a search) should require 10-15 links over time in addition to internal link mapping to accomplish a top 10 position, etc. By strategically augmenting your websites internal and external link profile to “pre-selected” landing pages (based on keyword research) which were crafted with the keyword array and conversion objective in mind, you can then create and implement this strategy on a scalable level.

SEO Technique#3: Using Co-Occurrence to Solidify On Page Relevance

Internal link augmentation – This is essentially using anchor text from pages indexed with a specific intent to transfer ranking factor through the use of internal links to other pages within the website. After you select the preferred landing page for a keyword, use the site:yourdomain.com keyword search operator in Google to see how many other pages Google sees as relevant to your query.

After you have the total number of pages listed that are candidates for that keyword, then link then all to the preferred landing page (preferably higher up in the body copy) using a variation of the keyword you want the preferred landing page to rank for.

We know that a link from a relevant page to another relevant page (either through allintitle, allintext or allinanchor) can augment rankings more than off topic inbound anchor text. It is not to say that you won’t need some internal or external link diversity eventually, but you also need to make it clear what the intention is for each keyword you map out and to which page that relevance will flow; this accomplished that objective.

Creating your own islands of topical relevance through using keyword to content continuity (providing enough content to cross the tipping point) and then augmenting the internal links allows your pages to rank higher with less dependence on off page SEO factors (mainly other links).

You should use co-occurrence whenever possible to shore up keywords within your own website and if your links are absolute http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html versus using relative internal links such as /page.html/ from page to page in your site architecture, those absolute links will eventually become backlinks (since PageRank and rankings are evaluated on a page to page basis).

This is also why you can see up to two results from one website on a page for a specific query as well as If there is a sub domain that can provide up to two listings on the same page for one query. You could occupy multiple spots on a page if you map out your objectives in advance (although one above the fold should be suitable).

SEO Technique#4: Using Sitemaps to Augment Rankings

Sitemap Optimization – Most think of sitemaps as a tool to aid crawlers in discovering your content. Sure, they are that indeed, but they also play a more significant role in SEO. Sitemaps can act as hidden navigation or secondary navigation to bridge link flow from one segment of a website to another to provide augmentation.

For example if I have 5 solid landing pages I want to promote I would put them in a sitemap. That sitemap (even though it only has 5 links leaving it) would serve as a hub for providing ranking factor. If I then put a link to that sitemap (using a relative keyword) from the pages that have the strongest affinity with that keyword (such as 20 other supporting pages that now link to the sitemap). I can then control the reputation and internal ranking factor through using the sitemap as a hub.

In addition, you can also use the sitemap to build external links to as well and implement a noindex, follow tag in the meta data so it does not compete with your preferred landing pages.

The mentioned SEO techniques and tactics above are priceless when implemented on a grand scale. Don’t believe me, then try competing with Wikipedia who also uses similar tactics to devour market share using a fraction of the time, regardless of the keyword, market or niche due to the granular coherence of internal to external link mapping in contrast to keyword to content continuity.