What do you need to compete in SEO?
Some say more inbound links, others better content, while some might emphasize a technically sound page.
Experienced SEOs know that the most successful sites when it comes to organic search have the right mix of high-level foundations.
In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to E-A-T (expertise, authority and reliability) as mentioned in Google’s Search Quality Score Guidelines.
Some have thought of them as the most basic aspects of SEO.
However, as important as E-A-T may be for some sites, it deals with only one aspect: content.
A holistic SEO program must include more.
Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that SEO can be reduced to its most basic level by embedding three things in a website and its pages:
Sites that pay attention to all three of these sites are more likely to be appreciated by both search engines and users, and will attract more organic traffic over time.
Notice that one of my categories, authority, overlaps with the E-A-T category.
This is because I believe that at the highest level of SEO, expertise and reliability are truly parts of what makes a website or page authoritative.
Let’s dive into each of these A-R-E categories to see how they should be incorporated into a holistic SEO program.
Authority: Do You Matter?
In SEO, authority refers to the importance or weight given to a page relative to a given search query.
Modern search engines like Google use many factors (or signals) when assessing the authority of a website.
Why does Google care about assessing site authority?
For most queries, there are thousands or even millions of pages available that can be ranked.
Google wants to put at the top those who are most likely to satisfy users with accurate, reliable information that fully matches the intent of the query.
Google makes sure to provide users with the most authoritative pages for their queries because users who are satisfied with the pages they click on are more likely to use Google again, and thus more exposure to Google ads, their primary source of revenue.
Authority Came First
Assessing the authority of websites was the first fundamental problem that search engines had to solve.
Some of the earliest search engines relied on human evaluators, but as the World Wide Web exploded, it quickly became impossible to scale.
Google has overtaken all of its competitors because its creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed the idea of Rank, using links from other sites on the web as weighted quotes to assess the site’s authority.
Brin realized that the links were an already existing survey system that was constantly evolving, where other authoritative sites “voted” for sites they considered reliable and relevant to their users.
Search engines use links similar to how we could treat scientific citations. The more scientific papers relevant to the original document that cite it, the better.
The relative authority and reliability of each of the sources cited also come into play.
So, of our three core categories, authority came first because it was the easiest to break given the ubiquity of hyperlinks on the web.
The other two, relevance and user experience, will be addressed later, as machine-driven / AI-driven algorithms are developed.
Links Still Primary For Authority
The big innovation that made Google the dominant search engine in a short period of time was that it used web link analysis as a ranking factor.
This began with work written by Larry and Sergey Brin entitled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertext Web Search Engine.
The basic insight behind this paper was that the web is built on the notion of documents that are interconnected through links.
Because posting a link to your site on a third-party site could cause a user to leave your site, the publisher didn’t have much incentive to link to another site unless it was really good and of great value. for users of their site.
In other words, linking to a third-party site acts as a “voice” for it, and each vote can be considered support, supporting the page the link points to as one of the best resources on the web for a given topic.
Then, in principle, the more votes you get, the better and more authoritative the search engine would consider you, and therefore you should rank higher.
Passing PageRank
Much of Google’s initial algorithm was based on the concept of PageRank, a system for estimating which pages are most important based on the scoring of the links they receive.
Thus, a page that has large amounts of valuable links pointing to it will have a higher PageRank and in principle will likely be ranked higher in search results than other sites without such a high rating PageRank.
When a page links to another page, it forwards part of its PageRank to the page it links to.
Thus, pages accumulate multiple Rankings based on the number and quality of links they receive.
Not All Links Are Created Equal
So more votes is better, right?
Well, that’s true in theory, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.
The results of the PageRank range from a base value of one to values that probably exceed trillions.
Pages with a higher PageRank can have a lot more PageRank to go through than pages with a lower PageRank. In fact, a link from one site can easily be worth more than a million times a link from another site.
Let’s use our intuition for a moment.
Imagine you have a site that sells a book and has two links. One is from Joe’s Book Store and the other is from Amazon.
It’s pretty obvious which you would appreciate more as a user, right? As users, we understand that Amazon has more authority on this topic.
As it turns out, the web has also recognized this, and Amazon has a much more powerful link profile (and higher rank) than any other book-selling site.
As a result, it has a much higher PageRank and can transfer multiple PageRank pages to which it links.
It is important to note that Google’s algorithms have evolved far from the original thesis of PageRank.
The way relationships are assessed has changed significantly – some we know and some we don’t.
What About Trust?
You may hear many people talk about the role of trust in ranking search and rating link quality.
For the record, Google says they don’t have a concept of trust that they apply to links (or rankings), so you should take those discussions with lots of salt.
These discussions started because of Yahoo’s patent for the TrustRank concept.
The idea was that if you start with an initial set of manually selected, highly trusted sites, and then count the number of clicks you need to switch from those sites to yours, the fewer clicks, the more credible your site.
Google has long said it does not use this type of metric.
However, in April 2018, Google was granted a patent relating to the assessment of the credibility of links. But the existence of an approved patent does not mean that it is used in practice.
However, for your own purposes, if you want to assess the reliability of a website as a source of a link, using the concept of trusted links is not a bad idea.
If they do any of the following, then that’s probably not a good source for a link:
Google may not calculate trust the way you do in your analysis, but chances are high that some other aspect of their system will devalue that connection anyway.
Fundamentals Of Earning & Attracting Links
Now that you know that getting links to your site is key to SEO success, it’s time to start putting together a plan to get them.
The key to success is understanding that Google wants this whole process to be holistic.
Google actively discourages, and in some cases penalizes, schemes to obtain links in an artificial way. This means that certain practices are considered bad, such as:
What Google really wants is to make a fantastic website and promote it effectively, with the result that you earn or attract links.
Who Links?
The first key insight is to understand who it is that could be related to the content you create.
Here is a chart that profiles the main groups of people in any market space:
Who do you think are the people who could implement the connections?
These are certainly not backward, and neither is the early or late majority.
These are innovators and early adopters. These are people who write on media sites or have blogs and who can add links to your site.
There are other sources of links, such as locally-oriented sites, such as the local chamber of commerce or local newspapers.
You may also find some opportunities with colleges and universities if they have sites that relate to some of the things you do in your market space.
Relevance: Will Users Swipe Right On Your Page?
You need to be relevant to a particular topic.
Think of every visit to the site as an encounter in a dating app. Will users “swipe to the right” (thinking, “this looks like a good match!)”?
If you have a page about Tupperware, it doesn’t matter how many links you get – you’ll never rank for queries related to used cars.
This defines the limitation of link power as a ranking factor and shows how relevance also affects link value.
Consider a page on a website that sells a used Ford Mustang. Imagine getting a link from Car and Driver magazine. That connection is very relevant.
Also, think about this intuitively. Is it likely that Car and Driver magazine has some expertise regarding Ford Mustangs? Of course they have.
In contrast, imagine a link to that Ford Mustang from a page that usually writes about sports. Is the link still helpful?
Probably, but not so useful, as there is less evidence for Google that the sports site has a lot of knowledge about used Ford Mustangs.
In short, the relevance of a link page and a link page affects how much a link could be considered valuable.
How does Google rate relevance?
The Role Of Anchor Text
Anchor text is another aspect of links that is important to Google.
Anchor text helps Google verify what the content of the receiving page is.
For example, if the anchor text is the term “iron tub” and the page has content on that topic, the anchor text, plus the link, acts as additional confirmation that the page is on that topic.
Thus, links work by assessing both the relevance and authority of the site.
However, be careful because you don’t want to aggressively get links to your site that all use your main keyword phrase as anchor text.
Google is also looking for signs that you are manually manipulating links for SEO purposes.
One of the simplest indicators is whether your anchor text looks manipulated manually.
Internal Linking
There is growing evidence that Google uses internal linking to assess how relevant a site is to a topic.
Properly structured internal links that link related content are a way to show Google that you have a well-covered topic, with pages on many different aspects.
By the way, anchor text is just as important in creating external links as it is for external, inbound links.
The entire structure of your site is linked to internal linking.
Think strategically about where your pages are in the site hierarchy. If it makes sense for users, it will probably benefit search engines.
The Content Itself
Of course, the most important indicator of the relevance of a page must be the content on that page.
Most SEOs are aware that assessing the relevance of query content has become much more sophisticated than simply owning the keywords a user is searching for.
Due to advances in natural language processing and machine learning, search engines like Google have significantly increased their competence in evaluating content on a page.
What are some things Google might be looking for when determining which queries a site should be relevant to?
What About E-A-T?
Of course, Google encourages all website owners to create content that makes the visitor feel like authoritative, reliable content written by someone with expertise appropriate to the topic.
But how much they work or are able to rate those categories is still a matter of debate.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the more YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) your site has, the more you need to pay attention to E-A-T.
YMYL sites are those whose main content deals with things that could affect the well-being or finances of people.
If your site is YMYL, you should make every effort to ensure the accuracy of your content and show that it is written by qualified professionals.
Building A Content Marketing Plan
Last but not least, make the right content marketing plan.
Don’t start doing a lot of random things at once.
Take the time to study what your competitors are doing so you can put effort into content marketing in a way that is likely to provide a solid ROI.
One approach to this is to pull their feedback profiles using tools that can do so.
With this information, you can see what types of links they are getting, and then based on that, figure out what links you need to get to win them.
Take time for this exercise and for mapping which links lead to which pages on competing sites, as well as what each of those sites ranks for.
Creating this type of detailed view will help you determine your attack plan and give you an understanding of which keywords you could rank for.
In addition, study the contestant’s content plans.
Learn what they do and think carefully about what you can do that is different.
Focus on developing very clear differentiation in your content for topics that are highly sought after by your potential customers.
This is another investment of time that will be spent very well.
Experience
As we followed above, Google started by focusing on ranking pages by authority, and then found ways to assess relevance.
The third evolution of search was user experience evaluation.
In fact, many SEOs (and I am among them) prefer to talk about SEO not as a search engine optimization, but as an optimization of the search experience.
Google has realized that authority and relevance, as important as they are, are not the only things users look for when searching.
Users also want a good experience on the pages and pages to which Google sends them.
What is a “good user experience”? Include at least the following:
In addition, many of the above suggestions for creating better content also apply to user experience.
In short, Google wants to rank pages that meet the query and make it as easy as possible for a search engine to identify and understand what it is looking for.
Putting It All Together
Search engines want happy users who will keep coming back to them when they have a question or need.
The way to create and maintain that happiness is by providing the best possible outcomes that meet that issue or need.
In order for users to be satisfied, search engines must be able to understand and measure the relative authority of websites for the topics they cover.
When you create content that is very useful (either engaging or entertaining) to visitors – and when those visitors feel your content is reliable enough to be happy to come back to your site or even search for you above others – you gain authority.
Search engines are working hard to continually improve their ability to match that human quest for reliable authority.
As we explained above, the same type of quality content is key to making money on the types of links that ensure that search engines rank you highly for relevant searches.
This can be content on your site that others want to link to, or content that other quality, relevant sites want to publish, with relevant links back to your site.
Focusing on these three pillars of SEO – authority, relevance and experience – will increase opportunities for your content and make it easier to make money on links.
Now you have everything you need to know for SEO success, so get to work!
Featured image: Paulo Bobita / Search Engine Diary
Relevance leads to strong links for brands and consumers. When a consumer thinks your product or service is relevant, he (consciously or unconsciously) begins to build a relationship with your brand. They come back for more content, browse your website and participate in your online presence.
What is a good SEO score out of 100?
A good SEO result is between 80 – 100. SEO results in this range indicate that your website meets the highest quality standards for search engine optimization in the areas of technical SEO, content, user experience and mobile use.
How is the SEO score calculated? Your site’s final SEO rating is determined by its performance in four subcategories: technical, content, user experience, and mobile. Individual checks with different weights are summed to obtain a score for each of the subcategories.
What is a good site score?
Anything over 88 is considered good, but getting lower means you should make changes to increase your score. To determine how well your website is performing, you need to use a program that runs numerous tests on your site and gives you results within seconds.
What’s your SEO score?
What is SEO rating? SEO rating is a measure of how well the user-oriented and technical aspects of your site contribute to search engine optimization, and ultimately to higher rankings and organic traffic.
What is the highest SEO score?
| Google SERP position | SEO power |
|---|---|
| 1 | Excellent |
| 2 | Very good |
| 3-4 | Good |
| 5-10. | Average |
What website score means?
Website rating is the average rating on all website pages. By default, each page has 100 points. And we minus 100 points cost each mistake. The cost of error is not static for all websites.
How do you order search results relevance?
Sort the results
- In Control Panel, select the search engine you want to change.
- Click the search features in the left menu and open the Advanced tab.
- Click Sort Results.
- By default, sorting by relevance and date will already be available. …
- If you want to add a different sort method, click Add key.
How does Google sort by relevance? Relevance of web pages If these keywords appear on a page, or if they appear in headlines or body text, the information is more likely to be relevant. In addition to simply matching keywords, we use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries.
How do you determine the relevance of search term within a document?
Index score: The index score represents the textual relevance of the overall score. In other words, how well the search text matches the content of the documents. This takes into account spelling, synonyms, root, inserted words based on artificial intelligence, and other language-specific features.
What is relevance in search?
Simply put, the relevance of a search refers to the performance of a search engine and the relevance of its retrieved results. It is the ability of the user to quickly and easily search for information on your website. When a visitor enters a query, how exactly do the results match what they were looking for?
How do you determine relevance of search results?
Otherwise, the relevance of search results is calculated by comparing the proportion of results that contain a term with the relative frequency of terms for the term. This process is repeated for all terms in a set of related terms to produce overall diversity and relevance.
How does Google measure relevance?
In addition to simply matching keywords, we use aggregated and anonymized interaction data to assess whether search results are relevant to queries. We convert this data into signals that help our machine-learned systems better assess relevance.
How Google identifies most relevant search?
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return results that we believe are of the highest quality and most relevant to the user. Relevance is determined by hundreds of factors, which may include information such as user location, language, and device (work computer or telephone).
How do you determine relevance of search results?
Otherwise, the relevance of search results is calculated by comparing the proportion of results that contain a term with the relative frequency of terms for the term. This process is repeated for all terms in a set of related terms to produce overall diversity and relevance.
What is relevance in search?
Simply put, the relevance of a search refers to the performance of a search engine and the relevance of its retrieved results. It is the ability of the user to quickly and easily search for information on your website. When a visitor enters a query, how exactly do the results match what they were looking for?
How do search engines determine relevancy?
To determine relevance, search engines use algorithms, a process, or a formula to retrieve and sort stored information in meaningful ways. These algorithms have undergone many changes over the years to improve the quality of search results.
How is authority calculated?
How the authority score is calculated. The authorization rating is the result of a calculation performed by a neural network algorithm that uses machine learning to measure the authority of each domain based on quality, popularity, and feedback signals.
What is the rating of the authority? Authority rating is our complex domain rating that evaluates the overall quality of a website or website. The higher the score, the greater the assumed weight of domain or webpage backlinks.
How is authority measured?
YES is measured on a scale of one to 100. The higher the ranking, the higher the authority of the website. For example, an 80-page page has more authority than a 50-page page.
How is domain authority measured?
How is domain authorization calculated? Domain authority is calculated by estimating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the total number of links, into a single YES result. This result can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking power” of a website over time.
What is a good authority score?
Scores between 40 and 50 are considered average. Domain authority between 50 and 60 must be rated good. Scores above 60 rate domain jurisdiction as excellent.
How is domain authority calculated?
How is domain authorization calculated? Domain authority is calculated by estimating multiple factors, including linking root domains and the total number of links, into a single YES result. This result can then be used when comparing websites or tracking the “ranking power” of a website over time.
How do you calculate domain authority?
How do I verify my site’s domain authority? You can find out the domain authorization of any website using Moz’s Link Explorer, MozBar (Moz’s free SEO toolbar) or in the SERP analysis section of Keyword Explorer.
What does domain authority measure?
Domain authority is a search engine rating that measures how successful a page is when it comes to search engine results. It was created by software development company Moz and provides an overview of the probable performance of the search engine.
What is a good score for domain authority?
To rank a website’s domain authority, consider the following: Scores between 40 and 50 are considered average. Domain authority between 50 and 60 must be rated good. Scores above 60 rate domain jurisdiction as excellent.
How is Page Authority calculated?
The authority of the page is determined by a logarithmic scale of 100 points. The higher the PA score, the easier it is to rank the page. Site authority is also a comparative metric that allows a website to analyze performance against competitors.
What is a good authority score?
Scores between 40 and 50 are considered average. Domain authority between 50 and 60 must be rated good. Scores above 60 rate domain jurisdiction as excellent.
Do you want a high or low authority score?
Generally speaking, the higher the domain authority rating, the more it is trusted. It is based on a scale of 1 to 100 so the closer the authority rating is 100, the better. As the result increases, the effect of the connection will increase.
What does authority score mean?
The authorization rating is the result of a calculation performed by a neural network algorithm that uses machine learning to measure the authority of each domain based on quality, popularity, and feedback signals.
What’s average domain authority?
The average domain authorization is between 40 and 50, while anything between 50 and 60 is considered pretty good. Over 60 is considered great and sites rarely achieve more – unless you are someone like Facebook who has a perfect 100, even with all the fake news …
How many types of SEO are there?
There are three types of SEO you need for a well-rounded organic search strategy: on-site SEO, technical SEO, and off-site SEO. Breaking down your strategy and thinking about SEO as these three categories will make it much easier to organize and execute your optimization plans.
What are the 2 types of SEO? The most important types are Technical SEO, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.