While many people are familiar with common strategies like using keywords and creating backlinks, advanced SEO concepts often involve complex algorithms and user behavior analysis.
The main seven key advanced SEO concepts a beginner should first learn are Information Gain, PageRank, Long Clicks, Short Clicks, Navboost, TF-IDF, and BM25. Understanding these can give you a deeper insight into how search engines evaluate and rank content.
1. Information Gain
What is Information Gain?
Information gain refers to the value a piece of content adds to the search engine’s understanding of a topic. Search engines like Google are increasingly focused on providing users with fresh, unique, and helpful content. Information gain measures how much new or additional knowledge your content brings to a search result.
- If your content just repeats what other websites say, it has low information gain.
- If your content offers unique insights, new data, or a fresh perspective, it has high information gain.
This concept is tied to Google’s desire to deliver the best possible answer to user queries, rather than just regurgitating common knowledge.
Why is it important?
Google’s algorithms are getting better at detecting whether an article or page is offering something new or simply rehashing what others have said. High information gain leads to better rankings, especially for competitive terms.
How can you improve Information Gain?
- Research deeply into your topic and find gaps in existing content.
- Provide new statistics, case studies, or original ideas.
- Use your expertise to offer a perspective that isn’t readily available elsewhere.
2. PageRank
What is PageRank?
PageRank is one of the earliest and most fundamental algorithms developed by Google to rank web pages. It was created by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the late 1990s and revolutionized search engines.
PageRank is essentially a measure of a page’s authority based on its backlink profile. The core idea is that links from other websites act as “votes” for your page. Not all links are equal, though: a link from a highly authoritative page (with a high PageRank) counts more than a link from a lesser-known page.
How does it work?
- Pages that get a lot of backlinks from reputable websites are considered more authoritative.
- The authority of the page that links to you affects your PageRank. A link from a page with high PageRank boosts your rank more than a link from a low-PageRank page.
- PageRank values are shared across the web in a network of connections. When one page links to another, it passes some of its PageRank to the destination.
Why is PageRank still relevant?
Even though Google’s ranking algorithms are now much more complex and sophisticated, PageRank remains one of the most basic foundations of the way search engines value content.
How to increase PageRank:
- Earn backlinks from reputable and authoritative websites.
- Create high-quality content that people naturally want to link to.
- Guest post on well-regarded blogs or websites in your industry to get backlinks.
Keep in mind, there is a whole art behind approaching and writing guest posts in a way that is tasteful and effective. Hence, make sure that any content partnership is relevant and fits your niche.
Simulating PageRank with third-party scores
Various third-party SEO tools like Ahrefs offer scores like Domain Rating and URL Rating to give an estimate of the effect PageRank combined with other modern SEO factors. Domain Rating is for an entire domain, and the URL Rating is for a specific page or an URL.
3. Long Clicks
What is a Long Click?
A long click occurs when a user clicks on a search result, visits the page, and spends a significant amount of time there before returning to the search engine or ending the session. It indicates that the user found the content relevant, engaging, and satisfying to their query.
Long clicks are a strong positive user signal for search engines because they suggest that the content provided was valuable and relevant to the user’s needs.
How to encourage Long Clicks:
- Create in-depth, engaging content that answers user questions thoroughly.
- Make sure your website is easy to navigate so users don’t get frustrated and leave.
- Provide related content suggestions or a clear content structure that keeps users engaged.
- Improve readability with clear headings, bullet points, and visual elements like images and infographics.
Examples of Long-Click Content
The best example of content optimized for long clicks comes from HubSpot. Their Instagram Marketing guide clocks in at 11,097 words (as of September 2024)
But as you can read below under the BM25 section, writing long content in itself will not suffice, as there algorithms in place to balance content quality and length.
4. Short Clicks
What is a Short Click?
A short click is the opposite of a long click. It happens when a user clicks on a result but quickly returns to the search engine results page (SERP). This behavior is called pogo-sticking and signals to search engines that the content was unsatisfactory or irrelevant.
Why are Short Clicks bad for SEO?
Frequent short clicks on your page can send a signal to Google that users aren’t finding what they need, which can lead to lower rankings over time.
How to avoid Short Clicks:
- Write clear and compelling meta descriptions and title tags that accurately reflect your page’s content. This ensures users know what to expect before they click.
- Provide quick answers at the beginning of your content to capture attention and encourage users to stay longer.
- Optimize for mobile. If your site loads slowly or has poor usability on mobile devices, users will quickly bounce back to search results.
5. Navboost
What is Navboost?
Navboost is a concept related to navigation queries—searches where the user’s intent is to find a specific website or resource they already know about. Google gives a boost to websites that are directly related to these types of searches.
For example, if someone types in “Facebook login,” Google understands that the user wants to navigate directly to Facebook’s login page. As a result, Facebook will receive a Navboost, ensuring that it ranks first in the search results.
Why is Navboost important?
While most people focus on informational or transactional search queries, navigational searches make up a significant portion of searches. Ensuring that your brand or business is the go-to destination for your brand-related searches can enhance your visibility.
How to take advantage of Navboost:
- Make sure your brand and its key pages (like your homepage) are well-optimized for navigational queries.
- Use structured data to signal to search engines that certain pages are the main destinations for your brand or service.
6. TF-IDF
What is TF-IDF?
TF-IDF stands for Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency. It’s a way to measure how important a word is to a document relative to a collection of documents (like the entire internet or a particular dataset).
Here’s how it works:
- Term Frequency (TF): This measures how often a term appears in a document. If a word appears frequently, it has a higher TF.
- Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): This measures how rare a term is across multiple documents. If a term is used across many documents, it gets a lower IDF score because it’s considered common and less informative.
The combination of these two gives us TF-IDF, which helps search engines determine the relevance of a page for a given query.
Why is TF-IDF important?
While TF-IDF is not a ranking factor on its own, it helps content creators optimize for relevancy by identifying the key terms that should be emphasized in content to match user intent and rank higher.
How to use TF-IDF:
- Use tools to analyze which terms are over or under-used on your page relative to top-ranking competitors.
- Make sure your content contains relevant keywords in the right proportions without overstuffing them.
7. BM25
What is BM25?
BM25 is a modern algorithm used to rank documents based on relevance to a search query. It’s an advanced variation of TF-IDF and part of the Okapi BM25 family of ranking functions.
BM25 improves on TF-IDF by taking into account document length and keyword saturation. It helps to mitigate the problem where longer documents may unfairly get higher ranks due to containing more keywords.
How does BM25 work?
BM25 adjusts relevance based on:
- Term frequency: Similar to TF, but BM25 introduces diminishing returns. This means after a certain point, using the same keyword too many times won’t increase relevance much.
- Inverse document frequency: Similar to IDF, it values rare terms more, but BM25 adjusts this in a way that accounts for document length.
- Document length normalization: It ensures that shorter documents are not penalized and longer documents are not unfairly favored just because of their length.
Why is BM25 valuable?
BM25 helps balance keyword usage with content quality and relevance, preventing keyword stuffing and allowing for more natural language in content.
How to optimize for BM25:
- Write natural, comprehensive content that covers the topic thoroughly without forcing keywords in unnecessarily.
- Use keyword variations and synonyms to increase relevance without appearing spammy.
