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Understanding the Art and Science of SEO through Mathematics

Guest post by: John Alexander

Article Overview: For those who have followed traditional search engine optimization best practice guidelines over the years, I wanted to share several insights particularly for the business owners who are in highly competitive industries.

Understanding the Art and Science of SEO through Mathematics

The definition of SEO "best practices" might be defined as follows: --A series of a static rule sets (you follow the general rules and you should do okay.)

--Considered by many SEO professionals as the list of steps to use to optimize for any Web page

--Is the only white hat ethical way of performing optimization.

While many have experienced conflicting opinions about how to optimize a Web page, it usually amounts to a list of steps handed down from one person to another. There are those that try to publish algorithm details with break downs of technical aspects which include things like Keyword Density, Character counts, and hordes on information which all change from month to month. Many typical optimizers sign up for monthly fees to read all of these things thinking that they can actually reverse engineer an algorithm.

Once an optimizer does their work, they tend to look at their rankings to determine how successful they are. Then through months of small tweaks and changes they manage to get a single page good visibility. So if this is the standard that everyone practices, what's wrong with this picture?

People may make excuses saying well the algorithm keeps changing or how technically hard it is to optimize with any accuracy because your business is so competitive. We need to keep tweaking and changing your pages every month and follow the latest algorithm changes. All of these are inaccuracies and excuses compared to the optimization of a page through mathematics.

Lots of people talk about the art and the science of SEO, but few people are aware that the real solution to saving hundreds of hours or even months of work,

is to use good mathematics. But before I talk further on that, let me recap the part about SEO being an art and a science too.

"SEO as a science" is where most people get all hung up.

--Where do my keywords have the most impact?

--Which of the some 200 ranking signal are most important this month?

--What do I need to change in my pages to gain top visibility to the most correct audience for my product or service and hold that spot at the top for the maximum

amount of time?

I refer to this as the science part of SEO because it is primarily the technical understanding of what to do to your pages so they gain genuine relevance.

"SEO as an Art" is the creative side of SEO.

One of the biggest parts of SEO that people refer to is the "art of SEO." While people discuss it all the time, not many really spend much time explaining SEO as an art. By the "art of SEO" I refer to the creative possibilities. From Keyword research and keyword forensics right down to finding the right type of content to publish that will convert your audience of Web visitors.

Then finally, I refer to the mathematics of performing SEO.

Many people think they need to keep trying to beat an algorithm in order to win the day. This is simply not true. You do not need to understand an algorithm or try to cheat a search engine to gain top visibility. Here is the thing folks often forget:

"You are not in competition with a search engine - But you are in competition with your competitors. Now through mathematics, it thoroughly possible to research exactly what things you need to do to move up the ladder using competitive intelligence and mathematics. What is the primary benefit of using this methodology? It saves you months of time and months of money.

Optimize a page with preciseness and exact accuracy for your own competitive marketplace. Do the optimization once, get it right first time and at the same time, you have a complete picture of your competitors strengths and weaknesses and you can even identify any threats to your visibility, before it occurs.

In Summary:

Why go through all the turmoil of waiting weeks or months to get top exposure on the search engines, when now it is possible to do it in just a minimum number of moves. Get it right first time without the stress or constantly going back to the stale old best practices list and laboring on a project for weeks.

Time is money and remember that the next time someone tells you need to know an algorithm, remember that you don't. You can measure with great accuracy exactly what changes you need to make and then optimize your page once, get it right based on all of top competitors.

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Article Tags: art and science, business owners, insights, mathematics, search engine optimization, seo, traditional search engine



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