When trying to get your site more traffic it’s important to remember how your page is actually ranked. Once you understand the simple fundamentals it’s easier to build a good search engine optimisation strategy around the key points.
As I mentioned before in this blog Google doesn’t rank web pages. It indexes your text and assigns each word into a bucket. Once a user searches for a keyword on Google it’s a matter of finding a web page that is considered the best match for that keyword and from a website it considers an authority on the subject. Plus that site must be listed as a trusted site in Google.
Is my site relevant
How relevant your page is to the keyword being searched is determined by the information a search engine can read from your page. There are countless seo browsers you can use to check this. One that I use sometimes is
http://www.seo-browser.com/
There are a lot of different on page factors that are used to measure the relevance, with the Page title and on page keyword use being the most important. When looking at your page ask yourself is the keyword you are looking to rank for promoted on the page. Will Google know what this page is about ?
Is my site an authority
Being considered an authority site on a particular topic is a social indicator of how many other sites endorse this. It’s a measure of your expertise on a certain topic, which is backed up by others in your industry. An example of this for SEO would be Aaron Wall from seobook.com who would be considered one of the best at what he does.
If you run a niche business on “dog training” then you will be looking to produce content that gets links back from others who run websites in the dog industry (if there is a such a thing). The type of links you are looking to get can be listed as: (with the most important first):
1. A website that already has a lot of authority (many backlinks) and is related to your business
2. A website with some authority (few backlinks) and is related to your business
3. A website with lots of authority (many backlinks) and is not related to your business
4. A website with some authority (few backlinks) and is not related to your business
So remember authority is really all about backlinks the best kind coming from the sector your work in.
How does Google Trust my site
It has been reported that Google is putting more importance on a sites Trust rank diminishing the importance it put onto page rank (authority). Although I have no idea if this is true, there are always SEO rumours flying around. A sites trust is a measure of how reliable it is in providing the required information. Google uses several factors to determine this including the two discussed above. One of the biggest is a sites domain age. It would seem Google’s algorithm has some type of time based factors that do make it difficult for a new site to rank well from an early stage. But SEO is a long term strategy and this should be kept in mind.
Google’s trust rank is the reason there is such a thriving business in site flipping (more on that another time) …
Related posts:
- SEO at a Glance – An introduction, Parsing, Crawling and Indexing
- The 12 Days of Link Building
- The idea behind Google and how it’s relevant to your SEO Strategy
- Google Instant Preview & Deep Page Rankings = Better Leads
- WordPress SEO, WP SEO, Nofollow and Page Titles
