If you consider what processes you would use to decide the topic, trust level, and popularity of a website you would likely start to come up with a list of things to look for:
What is the Topic or Focus?
We want to know what the website is about. What parts of a web page can a search engine use to sort out the topic of a website?
- Titles of pages
- Descriptions on pages
- Anchor text in links to pages
- Heading tags, or bold/emphasized text
- Carefully optimized content with focus on relevant phrases
- Destinations of links on the site
- .. and more!
How do search engines determine Trust & Popularity?
Keeping the search results free of cheats and abusers is a full time job for search engines. Luckily there are a lot of really clear signals that can help or harm the trust and popularity of websites:
- Quantity of sites which link to this website or web page
- Number of spam links pointing to the website or web page
- When people click this site in the search results, do they come right back to the search?
- How many pages do searchers browse on the site and how much time is spent?
- How often unique content is published
- Frequency of the site’s content getting shared or discussed on social media
- Etc.. etc.. the real list grows each day!
In the world of SEO this list of issues and perks are often called “Ranking Factors“, and while Google refuses to confirm every single ranking factor that exists, those of us in the web marketing industry do keep track of the most important factors. Heck in 2013 Moz.com, a search engine specialist that SEOs turn to for guidance, ran a survey of over 120 search marketing companies. The result is a list of 80 ranking factors that still holds plenty of truth today.
Search Engine Trends
As the search engines update and evolve this will cause changes to how the sites we work on rank, for better or worse, and it’s crucial for us to understand the relationship between the ranking changes and search engine updates. Over time this effort of constantly improving websites/responding to ranking updates teaches us and gives us valuable insights that we can then apply to your website to improve rankings and conversions.
Traffic != Conversions
Noticed how we do not say that all we do is “improve traffic”? This is because an increase in traffic doesn’t always mean an increase in conversions/sales/profits. In fact if you get the wrong type of traffic coming to your website this could make your site look bad and harm your rankings. Why guess at what marketing efforts work/don’t the hard way when there are experienced professionals willing to share their knowledge and skills with you?
Looking for a local Victoria SEO & Web Marketing Agency?
Caorda is completely Canadian! We were founded in Victoria BC by local residents who needed better solutions for the online businesses of their clients. If you are on Vancouver Island and don’t feel like paying ferry fares to have meetings with your web marketing team, Caorda’s office in downtown Victoria will save you time and money. Going with a local SEO is more than just convenience, our Victoria Digital Marketing page covers lots of reasons for choosing Caorda for your web marketing. Please visit our contact page if you would like to get in touch with us and start optimizing your website for better search rankings.
We’d love to hear from you.