Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of improving your traffic from search engines – particularly (but not exclusively) from Google. Most SEO experts will focus primarily on Google because it is by far the largest search engine in the world, but will also try to improve traffic from Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask.com because they are still getting significant amounts of users each day.

Google accounts for 72.70% of all searches in the United States, according to Hitwise:

Google accounts for 62.9% of all searches in the United States, according to comScore:

As you can see, there is a huge gap between Google and everyone else.That gap gets bigger every day. Focusing your efforts on Google will give you the most traffic and that’s why Google optimization and search engine optimization are becoming more and more synonymous. This lesson will focus on Google but will also be useful if you’re trying to optimize for Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

Search Engine Positioning and Traffic Potential

Typically, the earlier your web site (or web page) appears in Google’s search results, the more traffic you can expect to get. If you’re #7 for a term or phrase related to your business, you can expect to get more traffic than you would get at #13. If you’re #1 for the term, you would get more traffic than you could get at #7.

Each search phrase is entirely different in its ability to bring traffic, because different numbers of people search for different phrases. ‘Food’ is searched for over 6,000,000 times each month in Google but ‘beach food’ is only searched for about 500 times per month.

You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find out how many times each phrase is searched for. I have prepared a short video that will show you how to use this tool effectively:

If keywords have search volume, they can bring traffic to your site. It’s your job to do proper SEO so that your site can rank as highly as possible.

Major SEO Ranking Factors

Once you have a keyword phrase (or keyword phrases) that can bring traffic, you will want Google to rank your site well for that keyword. That means you need to learn what Google wants to see and then give it to them. There are a lot of different factors that you need to learn and some are more important than others. It’s widely believed that these are the most important 10 factors that Google wants to see:

1. Keyword use in title tag
2. Anchor text of inbound links
3. Global link popularity of the site
4. Age of the site
5. Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
6. Topical relevance of inbound links to site
7. Link popularity of site in topical community
8. Keyword use in body text
9. Global link popularity of linking sites
10. Topical relationship of linking pages

SEO is highly debatable, but this information is taken from 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization and published in a study by SEOmoz. I also agree personally that these are very strong factors that can not be discounted. That said, the terminology is brutal so I want to explain each of these factors and put them in context.

Keyword Use In Title Tag

When we refer to the ‘title tag’, we’re referring to the piece of code for a web page that creates the text that appears in the blue bar that runs across the top of a web browser (I put a red box around the area):

Other common names for title tag: title, page title, HTML title, HTML title tag

If you look for the code that creates the HTML title for your webpage, it will look something like this:

<title>Your Title Goes Here</title>

Most search engine optimizers believe that having your keyword phrase in the title tag of your web page is one of the most important ranking factors to consider. In my experience this is a crucial aspect of SEO – you must have your keyword in the title tag of the page you’re trying to rank.

Google ranks each page of your site independently so you don’t need to have the keyword in the title tags of all of your pages. It only needs to be there for the page you want to show up in Google’s search results. This allows you to target many keywords with each site because you’re only limited by the amount of relevant pages you want to have on your site. Wikipedia ranks in the top 5 for hundreds of thousands of different keyword phrases because they have hundreds of thousands of pages that cover hundreds of thousands of keyword phrases.

Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask also use the title tag as a ranking factor.

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

Links have an enormous affect on how well any web page ranks in Google. Wikipedia ranks so well because millions of web pages link to them. This happens because Wikipedia has become the go-to place for definitions on just about everything.

If I wanted to help Wikipedia to rank for ‘dog collar’, I could link to their page about ‘dog collar’, like this: dog collar. As you can see, I used the term ‘dog collar’ to make the link and that means that ‘dog collar’ is the anchor text for the link I made.

Definition: Anchor text is the text used to create a link. Anchor text = link text
Example: online pets – ‘online pets’ is the anchor text of this link.

When a web page gets linked to with anchor text that matches the keyword phrase they are trying to rank for, it will help them to move up in Google. That means that getting anchor-text links from other sites is a fantastic way to move up in Google’s rankings. Here’s a short video that will help you to understand more fully the relationship between anchor text and rankings:

Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask also use the anchor text of inbound links as a ranking factor.

Global Link Popularity of The Site

Global link popularity is the total amount and strength of links pointing at your entire site. If you have a brand new site you probably have weak global link popularity. On the other hand, if you own The New York Times you have fantastic link popularity. As of this morning, The New York Times website has about 39,500,000 links pointing at it.  Yahoo’s website has over 100,000,000 links pointing at it.

The incredible global link popularity of these sites is what allows them to rank quickly and easily for most things that they write about. If you search Google for news stories that break, you’ll find sites like these most of the time.

You don’t need to have equivalent link popularity to these sites to be able to rank well for your keyword phrases. However, the more you can increase your global link popularity by getting more and more links from other sites, the better rankings you’ll have with Google (see Link Juice).

This factor is quite different than many others because it isn’t black or white. If you look at global link popularity versus using your keyword phrase in the title tag, an entirely different mindset has to be here. With the title tag, your keyword is either there or it isn’t. With link popularity, you can build an infinite number of links. This concept isn’t black or white and actually ‘hot or cold’ would be a much better comparison. You can keep increasing the heat forever (by continuing to get more and more and more links), or you can leave your site at maximum coldness (without links at all).

The link strength of the sites who are linking to you is also a factor (see Global Link Popularity of Linking Sites, below).

Age of the Site

When I talk to new website owners about this ranking factor they usually tend to get mad. They don’t want it to be true because there’s nothing that they can do to make their site older. Unfortunately for them, Google does use age as a factor in calculating rankings.

When you’re working on getting an older site ranked, it’s honestly easier. The age is a definite advantage. That said, you can outrank an older site by beating up on it in other areas. For example, if your new site has much better global link popularity than your older competitor, you can still beat it for rankings.

Depending on the nature of your site and business, you may want to consider buying an older site or domain. This can put you at a competitive advantage and can take away the lead weight that comes from working with a brand new site.

I’ve done a lot of work on brand new sites and you can always get them to come around. Sure, you need to have patience but an increase in link popularity can almost always override anything else.

Link Popularity Within the Site’s Internal Link Structure

An area where many site owners and webmasters go wrong is in creating a structure that creates strength for the pages that they need/want to get ranked.

Let’s say for example purposes that you have a page about ‘red race cars’ that you really want to move up in Google. You have already placed ‘red race cars’ in your title tag and are working on your global link popularity. One of the most important things you can do is increase the link popularity from within your site. It doesn’t matter if you’re working with a home page or another page, you need to use your site to pass more links to your page about ‘red race cars’.

You can edit your posts about ‘blue race cars’, ‘green race cars’, and ‘purple race cars’ to ensure that you’re linking back to the page you would like to improve the rankings for. Simply put, you want to pass as many links as possible to your ‘red race cars’ page, from within your site. This shows Google that its an important page within your site and helps you to increase your score for this ranking factor.

Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site

If you’re trying to rank for ‘red race cars’, the ideal links from other sites (these are called inbound links) will be from other sites about ‘red race cars’. You will also get a lot of value with links from other types of race cars and for that matter, from any sites about cars. Links from sites that are topically related to your keyword phrase will always pass the most value.

A link from a site about baby clothes wouldn’t pass nearly as much value to your ‘red race cars’ site. A link from a site about monkey videos would also not pass as much value as a link from a more closely related site.

Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community

Google knows that there are lots of sites about red race cars (and most other topics). They also know that if there is a truly spectacular site about red race cars, many of the other red race car sites will probably be linking to it. Every topic works this way and that’s why it’s one of Google’s ranking factors. If you can get links from most of the sites about red race cars, you’ll probably be the best site for this part of Google’s ranking system.

There are plenty of situations where the best site doesn’t get links from everyone else. This can happen because of jealousy or because of the competitive nature of the internet. For that reason Google has many factors that they use to calculate rankings and this is just one of them. You don’t have to be the best for every factor to win, however, if you are the best for every factor you will win.

The best way to get links from other sites in your topical community is to create content that provides value to the community as a whole. Getting links is a lesson for another day but I hope that this lesson helps you to recognize the need for getting them.

Keyword Use in Body Text

This ranking factor is one of the easiest to complete. All you have to do is use your keyword phrase in the text of the page – the part of the page that your visitors can read.

Definition: body text = the text that visitors can read.

Some people use elaborate systems to calculate exact keyword densities and believe that they need to use the keyword phrases a certain number of times to rank well. I haven’t found this to be the case. I simply make sure that I use the keyword once or twice within the body text of the page that I want to rank.

Sometimes it makes sense to use your keyword more than twice within the text of the page you’re trying to get ranked. You may need to use the keyword more than twice just to make sure that it makes sense to the reader, especially in the case of longer articles. You don’t usually go wrong by providing the reader exactly what they’re looking for.

Global Link Popularity of Linking Sites

Another huge part of global link popularity is that not all links are created equal. A link from a really strong site will yield results exponentially higher than a link from a weaker site would. Additionally, a link from the strongest page of the strong site would yield greater results than a link from a weaker page on the same, strong site.

A link from a really strong site could make more difference than thousands of links from weaker sites. Google has a metric that you can use to determine the strength of pages and sites with relative accuracy through a system called PageRank. In the following video I will show you how to install the Google Toolbar and use it to determine the strength of sites and pages that you’re getting links from:

Topical Relevance of Linking Pages

So we want to rank for ‘red race cars’. We’re even able to get links from sites about red race cars. However, the actual links are from pages about computer processors. That’s right – computer processor pages on red race car sites. These aren’t the ideal links. The ideal links would be from red race car pages on red race car sites.

We don’t live in a perfect world and search engine optimization doesn’t have to be perfect. Computer processor links would do just fine if they were from sites about red race cars. However, links from red race car pages would be better.

Other SEO Ranking Factors

Size of Site

Sites with more pages of quality content seem to rank more easily in Google than smaller sites. This correlation makes sense in that a site that has 1,000 pages of content on a subject will often be a better resource than a site that has one page of content on the subject.

Thoroughness of Resource

Many SEOs believe that Google uses their understanding of word correlations to alter rankings. For example, this theory would tell us that a good resource on Microsoft should mention Bill Gates.

Keyword Use in H1 tags

The H1 tag of a page is meant to designate the title of the body text. In the code of the page, the H1 appears as such: <h1>Your H1 Title Goes Here</h1>. Using your keyword in the H1 tags of a page allows Google to see that you’re telling your site’s visitors that this page is about the keyword you want to rank for.

Keyword Use in Bold

It’s widely believed that using your keyword in bold as a positive correlation with Google. This should be taken care of if you use your keyword in H1 tags.

Domain Registration Length
Some SEOs believe that there is a negative correlation between one year domain registrations and Google rankings. This ranking factor would definitely be quite small, but could make sense considering that most spammers are going to try to make things as cheap as possible and would therefore only register domains for one year.

Exact Match Domain Names

There’s no doubt that redracecars.com would be a lot easier to rank for ‘red race cars’ than courtcars.com would be. There is an exact match bonus in place for domains that match the keyword that’s searched for. Like anything else, this ranking factor can be overcome by having better scores in other areas.

Keyword Use In URLs

It’s definitely wise to use your keyword phrase in the URL of the page you would like to rank.

Rate of Growth in Links

The strongest sites often have the strongest rate of growth in links. This is generally because people like the site better than its competitors.

Search Engine Optimization Applied

It’s pretty easy to get lost when you try to implement SEO strategies. Obviously, this happens because there are so many different aspects to it. Many people don’t believe that they can ever beat the competition because they have specific disadvantages, i.e. the age of their domain.

In the end, any disadvantage can be overcome by getting better in other areas, specifically in the area of link popularity. If you can’t fix a disadvantage that you have, outdo your competitors in other areas.

The trump card in the search engine optimization world is link popularity. If you can get the most and best sites to link to yours you can almost always override any other ranking factor.

Tags: search engine optimization, SEO

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.