Even if you optimise your website for all the on-site factors, in most cases you will still not be able to get a top search ranking. Search engines look at both on-site factors and off-site factors.
In fact it is possible to rank well for a keyword even if it does not appear on your page. The most famous example of this is when you search for “click here” the download page for Adobe Reader is in the #1 position even though those words don’t appear on any page. This is because thousands of sites on the web put a link to also down Adobe Reader which says something like “click here to download Adobe Reader”.
The reason is that search engines want social proof from other sites that your site really is the best results for whatever someone searches for.
This social proof comes from other sites talking about or linking to your site. And more recently it is beginning to come from social signals from sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Remember that you might be competing with hundreds, thousands, or millions of other web pages for the same search term.
Lets say you have 2 websites SITE A and SITE B about TOPIC X. They both have equally well on-site optimised web pages but SITE B also has links pointing to it from articles, reviews or press releases on other websites related to TOPIC X. Which one do you think is going to be more relevant to the search engines?
Site B of course. This is because there is social proof from other sites that Site B is a good resource about Topic X.
This introduces a concept called link popularity. This used to be simply a measure of how many links pointed to your site. However people started to abuse the system and add their site on “link farms” and “reciprocal linking” schemes to artificially increase the number of links to their sites.
To stay one step ahead, search engines began to look at not only how many links a site has coming in, but also the quality of these links….
- The relevancy of these links – Links from relevant (topical) sites are worth a lot more than a random link from an off-topic site.
- The authority or trust-rank of the sites linking to you – Links from sites which are seen to be authority sites by the search engine will be MUCH more valuable than random links.
- The location of the sites linking to you – if you have a UK site it is better to have other UK sites linking to you than a bunch of global sites that may be in different languages.
- The diversity of your links. Variation in the types of links you get earns you more trust and Google love.
Search Engines like Google also look at linking patterns. If you suddenly get 1000 links to your site one month from stale sites, and nothing the next few months, this does not look natural and might raise a flag. It would be more natural if the new links to your site increased steadily month after month, as your site got more visibility. Or sudden boosts could be attributed to viral activities from social sites that regularly get updated and shared.
There are a number of things you can do to get this social proof and you will learn more in our SEO courses.
