Considerate Major Search Engine Behavior

There is no big hush-hush behind Google’s popularity. Google positioned itself as a ‘pure’ search engine;

Yahoo has always been a Search Engine and MSN joined the game lately. The ‘purity’ and focus of Google’s search, combined with their head start (Google offered search results for Yahoo early on) means that Google are just way ahead, and too tough to catch.

What this means for us search marketers is that we have to pay close attention to what Google says, and extra importantly, to what Google wants to achieve with its search engine rankings.

Ranking for Google is a matter of finding that web page that is considered the most relevant to the search query and is from a website that is measured an authority on the subject and is trusted.

Relevance

Relevance is measured by the information the search engine can read from a Busby SEO Test web page. As I stated earlier, each web page is a point of entry for your website, and you can (and should) optimize your website so that each web page is targeting a special keyword.

There are some factors on a web page that are used to measure relevance, with the Title tag and keyword usage on the page being the two most vital factors being used to measure relevance.

If a page is on ‘how to lose weight’ and the searcher has entered ‘how to build a boat’, this page is not going to be considered relevant and thus will not be part of results. On the other hand, a page on ‘building your own boat on a budget’ may be considered moderately relevant to the search query and therefore would stand a much better chance of appearing in the SERPs.

On-page SEO – changes made to your web pages to improve search engine rankings – is mainly concerned with increasing the relevance of your web pages to their target keywords (you will read more about this in later articles).

Authority

Authority is a ‘social’ indicator of how much a particular website or a particular web page is considered THE source on a certain topic. Authority measures expertise, and more importantly, the acknowledgement of that expertise within your industry and outside too.

If you run a golf accessories website and you have many other golfing sites linking to yours, it implies (to Google) that your website is measured a somewhat authoritative source on ‘golf accessories’. And if you have non-golfing sites linking to you as well, this will further enhance your ‘authority’ status, although this is tempered by the fact that the opinion of sites within your niche holds a greater value (because they themselves
are considered authorities on the subject).

Here is a quick list of the types of links that will suggest authority to your website – from least useful to the most:

• Site with few backlinks and unrelated to your site’s niche.
• Site with many backlinks (some authority) and unrelated to your site’s topic.
• Site with few backlinks and closely related to your site’s niche.
• Site with many backlinks (some authority) and closely related to your site’s niche.

Authority links are a key part of the link building procedure – hunting such links is an art as much as a science, and I will be showing you how in later articles when we talk about link building.

Individual Busby SEO Test Contest web pages can as well have authority on the same lines as websites do – which is why getting links to individual pages of your website (also known as deep linking) is a very vital part of the link building process.

Trust

Trust is a gauge of how reliable a website is in providing accurate information. Google uses several factors to measure trust – authority and relevance are two of them and so are links from other ‘trusted’ sites.

Another trust-measuring issue is time, and it is this bit that has had SEOs and webmasters going crazy over what is now normally called as the ‘sandbox’.

The ‘sandbox’ refers to a number of filters in Google’s ranking algorithm that prevent a website or web page from ranking highly until it has reached a certain threshold.

Does the sandbox truly exist? Google says that a set of quality-measuring filters could be mistaken for a sandbox because sometimes their effect can be the same as that of the suggested sandbox effect.

SEOs disagree, but here I tend to side with Google – there is no need for Google to intentionally hold back websites, but they do have a clear need to establish a website’s quality, and time-based filters that measure a site’s age, rate of updates, age of authority links, etc are a useful means of measuring that value.

Trust takes time to develop, but there are several strategies (all within Google’s guidelines) that you can just to boost your site’s trust and authority. However, ranking in Google is still a long term game, so suppose to have to wait. Depending on your chosen niche and your SEO strategy, it could be anywhere from 6 months to 18 months.

All three factors have some measure of overlapping amongst them. Anchor text can be used both to measure relevance and to measure authority, while links from a high ranking, popular website can convey both authority and trust to your website.

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