SEO Periodic Table: The Essential Elements of A Winning SEO Strategy

The SEO periodic table is a table of SEO factors that help understand the essential elements of a winning SEO strategy. It provides a framework, which outlines the dos and don’ts of SEO. There are 39 elements of SEO and they are placed into four groups.

• One-page SEO- Content, Architecture, and HTML.
• Off-page SEO- Trust, Links, and User.
• Toxins
• Emerging verticals.

Now let us understand each element of the SEO periodic table.

On-page SEO: Content

As you may have heard, content is king! And it always will be. The success of a website depends on the quality of the content. Your website must offer content that meets the users’ needs. The element to focus on while creating content are:

1. Quality: The content published on your website should be informative and useful. It should encourage the visitor to stay on your page.
2. Research: Conduct thorough research to identify the phrases that are essential to creating content. Also, research the language your audience is using to reach your website.
3. Keywords: Conduct thorough keyword research and integrate it into your content in a reader‑friendly manner.
4. Freshness: Search engines prefer and prioritize the freshness of content. To remain relevant to search engines, check if you have content that is redundant or outdated; see if it can be repurposed; if not get rid of them.
5. Answer: Search engines are constantly improving their algorithm to provide accurate answers to the audience. If your website/content answers users’ questions correctly your page will be displayed as a featured snippet on SERP.
6. Depth: Does your content contain sufficient substance? Rather than just scratching the surface of your topic, do lots of research. Remember that your content must add value to your audience.
7. Multimedia: Want to make your content unique? Add pictures, videos, and audio.

On-page SEO: Architecture

Your website’s architecture tells the search engine about the internal state of your site. The elements to focus on while formulating your website’s architecture are:

8. Crawl: Interlinking the right web pages help search engine bots to crawl through your site and rank the web pages.
9. Mobile: Optimize your website to be mobile-friendly. This encourages visitors who access the website from mobile phones and tablets to stay on your site.
10. Duplication: Use canonical URLs and redirects to avoid duplication.
11. Speed: Google considers speed as a ranking factor. Websites that load faster have an SEO advantage.
12. HTTPS: Does your site provide a secure connection? A site that uses encryption makes users feel safe enough to input personal information, if necessary.
13. URL: Including keywords in the URL is a type of strategy to rank the content. This allows the users and the search engine to understand what your page is about.

On-page SEO: HTML

Hypertext markup language or (HTML) is an important factor in SEO ranking. The following are the HTML elements to focus on:

14. Title: The title should provide clear information about the webpage and it should contain relevant keywords. It is a signal to the search engine and attracts the user to click on it.
15. Descriptions: Use Meta tags to describe what your pages are about.
16. Structure: Use schema markup language to transform your site’s data into enhanced listings. Use schema tags to help search engines know what the page/content is about.
17. Heading: Include keywords in the heading. H1 tag will always have keywords, but using keywords in sub-headings like H2 tag can help in SEO ranking.
18. AMP: AMP is a web framework that speeds up the delivery of content. Speed is an important element of SEO.

Off-page SEO: Trust

Maintaining your website’s trust can help you rank higher on the results page. The elements to be focused on while building your website’s trust are:

19. Authority: A website with good authority ranks higher. You can make use of Covet links, shares, and other signals to build authority.
20. Engagement: Your content must be in a way that visitors wish to spend more time browsing through your site rather than bounce.
21. Reputation: You can improve your website’s reputation by constantly publishing relevant content and interacting with your audience.

Off-page SEO: Links

Include outbound and inbound links on your website. The link elements to focus are:

22. Value: In order to increase the value of your website, add relevant, high-quality, and reputable links to your websites.
23. Anchors: Include a link that has similar keywords to your website to improve your ranking.
24. Backlinks: Use links to direct users from other websites to your website. The more high-quality the links, the better.

Off-page SEO: User

User experience is the ultimate factor to improve your website’s SEO ranking. Given below are the user elements.

25. Country: If you are operating in different countries, you need to create different content targeting specific geographies.
26. Location: Create content focusing on your local audience because local searches are increasing on Google.
27. User experience: Think about your audience, find out what their problems are, and create content to provide a clear solution to their problem. Do everything you can to enhance the user experience.
28. History: Analyze the history of your site. See who is visiting your site and from where; act accordingly.
29. Intent: Consider why someone is conducting a specific search and create your content based on this. The more relevant your content, the more often your website gets ranked and displayed on the search page.

Toxins

Thus far we learned the dos of SEO, here are the don’ts

30. Cloaking: Do not display pages other than your own to the search engine.
31. Scheme: Do not use black hat tricks to improve your SEO ranking.
32. Stuffing: Do not stuff a lot of keywords into your content.
33. Hiding: Do not hide keywords from your audience.
34. Piracy: Do not put pirated or illegal content on your website.
35. Intrusive: Do not bombard your website with ads and pop-ups.

Emerging Verticals

The following are the emerging elements of SEO. Ignore them at your own peril.

36. Voice: As the number of mobile phone users is increasing massively, make sure your content is optimized to be recognized by voice-activated searches.
37. Local: Integrate listings, reviews, maps, and NAPs to increase your SEO ranking in local searches.
38. Image: Use images.
39. Video: Internet users also find interactive videos highly engaging.

Make use of all these elements to improve your SEO rankings. Have something to share? Let us know in the comments section below.  We could design, develop and implement all the above for your website, just drop us a line