SEO pros area always looking for a way to gain higher ground via their technologies and skills and marketers need these skills as do their clients and the common folks who want to rise to the tops of the search engines. To achieve this takes great skill and lots of luck. Two areas of high importance, however, are the value of ‘relevance’ and ‘authority’ that can be the make or break point to anyone’s search engine and SEO efforts.
In the old days, keywords and links played the better part of both authority and relevance, with Google ranking authority on a scale of 0-10. Brokers lived and died parlaying advertising based on this but the technology was still primitive compared to Google’s new algorithms like RankBrain and others. Nowadays keywords still play a great part and inbound links do too, but in a more precise and distinctive manner. Today, relevance depends on how well your web page or site is SEO friendly. Proper placement of keywords, keygroups, keyphrases, make it easier for Google’s algorithms to decipher what your page is about and how relevant it is to a search query. Your competitor may have the right placed keyword that your site doesn’t and Google will see their site as being more relevant thus giving them the edge.
Authority is all about how important your site and pages are to others. If you have high-quality inbound links from other authority sites and pages, then your authority increases and you end up in the top dog seat. Having tons of links of an inbound nature doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s better to have one high authority inbound link than 20,000 useless and non-relevant or spammy inbound links. Appearing as important, serving the public is of far greater value and gaining that level of authority takes time, effort, and sometimes money. It takes lots of patience too because you’ve got to earn that authority although some buy inbound links from authority sites, but Google is not so easily fooled. An inbound link is like a spotlight on your site and if it’s full of non-relevant data, errors, slow load time, Google will know it is not a site worthy of that inbound high authority link and who knows what punishments they’ll dish out.
So how does one gain both authority and relevance? Hard work, plain and simple.
You’ve got to start from a solid foundation and clear goals to get the authority that you’re looking for. That means creating content that is great and constructing a site and pages that meet the standards of contemporary SEO. This takes some study and you may have to hire an SEO expert to get you going. Google will see your site has updated content, well-tagged content, interest from outside and most of all, relevance. It means your site hits the mark regarding what the site or page is supposed to be about. That other consider it useful. That’s where the authority gains come in. As your site and pages gain popularity, that popularity shows up to Google via inbound links from authority sites, social media, mobile friendly site construction and more. So if you have a keyword for a special type of construction tool and your content gets noticed by a big and active construction site with authority, that inbound link and traffic speaks for itself. Little by little you get more of these kinds of links and you’re going to see your search engine rankings keep on rising.
Image credit: 123rf.com