A reoccurring question that comes up when people are questioning Google on the metrics used for ranking is ‘Do you use domain authority?’
The answer from John Mueller of Google himself:
“No, that’s a proprietary Moz metric. We don’t use Domain Authority.”
John further expanded on the answer in an interview featured on brainlabsdigital.com:
“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘authority’ like that, but we do have some metrics that are more on a site level, some metrics that are more on a page level, and some of those site wide level metrics might kind of map into similar things.”
This can be further emphasized by Gary Illes, Google’s head webmaster trends analyst, in his comments back in 2019: “whatever Fishkin’s new theory is, those are generally made up crap.”
Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz and the creator of the “domain authority” theory-based metric, a metric Google does not officially use or even recognize as a valid metric in their search engine.
For years various 3rd party metrics have been referenced when making Google SEO assessments. Majestic’s “trust flow” and “citation flow” is another example. These metrics are based on 3rd party proprietary theory.
Theories have there place. Any veteran SEO has more than 1 or two ideas about how Google’s search engine work that is not revealed to the public by Google. Theories can lead to discovery but it’s dangerous when people start confusing them with proven facts.
I have search engine optimized websites for local pizza restaurants, law firms, and electronics manufacturers, just to name a few. This means I am skilled in “pizza SEO” “lawyer SEO” and “electronics manufacturer SEO”, right?
No, because those aren’t even things. SEO’s core fundamentals don’t change, regardless of industry.
However, as a marketer, I completely understand why all these different “types” of SEO exist: To target specific types of clients where there is usually more to be gained financially from said clients. Specifically, certain types of clients require significantly more work than others. With more work, comes more pay. I’m familiar with agencies that specialize in ecommerce site SEO because literally hundreds of thousands of pages need work in some cases. A team of multiple SEO specialists is needed.
Things like geographic target, page count, and competitor volume are just a few reasons why one client may differentiate greatly in workload from another.
Alternatively, SEOs target specific industries as a way to set themselves apart by being niche specific. Why be just a plain old boring SEO when you can be a “furniture SEO” who works solely with clients that sell furniture? If anything, it’s an effective way to cull the competition rather than compete with every SEO in the whole world for clients of all type. Regardless, the SEO core fundamentals are still the same. SEO process for a page about wooden rocking chairs is the same process as it is for a page about diesel engines.
However, to be fair, there are SEOs that have years of first hand experience in a certain industry which gives them a notable edge on the content side. You can write more when you know more and textual content is needed for SEO. Keep in mind though, the core SEO process doesn’t change: Keyword research and implementation, site structure, meta tags, fixing page errors, etc. Furthermore, a lot of content on a website doesn’t automatically equal a good rank as covered in a Search Engine Journal SEO article on content with John Mueller of Google back in 2018. The number 1 takeaway is “it’s not enough to just create content”
So, SEO is SEO and the work is exactly the same regardless of the website being worked on?
Not exactly.
SEO work can be broken down into 4 distinct categories based on the goal of the site. In this way, the SEO work that needs to be performed may require a different approach and follow different procedures:
Technical SEO
Technical SEO mainly focuses on technical details. Like the name implies, “technical” or factual and accurate information only. No opinions. Very little creativity. Fixing canonical errors, fixing broken links, and entering information into meta tags are some common examples of the work needed when you perform technical SEO.
Speed optimization though site structure and content management so that a website loads faster is an example of technical SEO.
Using Schema.org markup is another example of technical SEO. This kind of work is done in an attempt to get site links, rich snippits, or knowledge panels to appear in search results.
A company that sells sewing machine parts online complete with individual model numbers is an example of a client that would most likely need technical SEO.
Local SEO
Local SEO’s main goal is to focus on a specific geographical region. This type of SEO is usually done for local businesses that have a limited reach in terms of the service they provide. A pizza restaurant that offers delivery is a good example. In Google, a Google My Business (GMB) page is the key component of local SEO and even by itself, without a website attached to it, a GMB page can be a pretty powerful marketing tool for a local business.
Targeting specific keywords with local identifiers ({city, state}) is another example of Local SEO.
A local mom & pop ice cream shop is a good example of a business that would need local SEO.
Blackhat SEO
Disclaimer: It is not advised to use Blackhat SEO
Search engines have clear guidelines for people looking to rank well. Blackhatters ignore those guidelines and try to get results anyway possible. Google is clearly against link schemes , which are often used in Blackhat SEO. The information is under “Advanced SEO” on Google’s official website which did make me chuckle a little.
Although not illegal by definition, blackhat work can involve breaking the law (i.e. hacking a website) but most blackhatters don’t take things to this extreme and only break website policies instead which is not ethical but also not illegal.
Several years ago, when PageRank (Google’s official rank score per page) was public information, high scoring pages were a target for blackhatters looking for powerful link sources. Combined with blackhat automated link building tools and knowledge about which sites to drop a link on, it was the “Golden Age” for blackhat SEOs. Since PR has been made private and links have been devalued over time, blackhat SEO has only gotten weaker in effectiveness. There are still content spam tactics that are used but these tend to be short-lived sites that quickly get hammered by search engine spam prevention systems.
Getting caught doing blackhat SEO can get you into hot water with Google. A de-ranking or, worse yet, de-indexing can be the punishment in some cases. For this reason, it is not advised to use blackhat SEO on any website you are serious about making successful and stable.
An affiliate marketing site thats sole purpose is to direct web traffic to other companies products or services for monetary incentives is often the type of website that utilize blackhat SEO.
Whitehat SEO (SEO)
When industry professionals and official representatives of search engine giants talk using the term “SEO” what they are referring to is the following:
Adhering to policy guidelines and following new information (from official sources) surrounding algorithm updates to increase search engine ranking.
“Whitehat SEO” is the type of SEO that any professional SEO should be doing moving forward into 2021 if they are serious about this type of work as a career.
If you are doing both technical SEO and local SEO the right way then you are doing whitehat SEO.
If you are adding a nofollow tag to any link pointing to a product that you are reviewing (in exchange for compensation in someway) then you are doing whitehat SEO.
Not buying backlinks? Not doing a link exchange? Only allowing people to naturally link to you over time? Whitehat SEO. There are countless other examples and they all come down to following the guidelines and not trying to cheat the signals with blackhat tactics.
At this point, Google has provided enough transparency with search to give anyone a decent chance at ranking a website for consistant traffic. It’s just a matter of someone putting all this information together and executing it while continuing to stay up to date with whats happening in the world of search engines.
Any credible business, whether online only or brick and mortar, that wants to increase it’s presence in search engines in order to increase it’s revenue is going to want SEO.
Honorable Mentions
Mostly subsets of SEO rather than a stand alone category, here are other variations of SEO that are often singled out:
Greyhat SEO
Can you guess what this means? Yep, a little blackhat and a little whitehat. It’s debatable if this type of SEO is even a thing though since the moment you use blackhat techniques you are conducting blackhat SEO regardless if eveything you did up until that moment was whitehat.
Still, there are those in the SEO community that consider greyhat SEO a type of SEO simply from having both blackhat and white SEO knowledge and experience to execute both so it gets an honorable mention.
Recipe SEO
I recently wrote on recipe SEO on account of a famous celebrity pitmaster recently speaking out about his frustrations with Google when it comes to ranking recipes in Google search. Recipes (if done correctly) can show up as individual knowledge panels at the very top of search results. This mainly involves Schema.org markup so I am tempted to just say that recipe SEO is just an extension of technical SEO, like any SEO work that involves trying to get knowledge panels to appear. There seems to be a lot of focus lately on specifically getting recipes (cooking at home because of COVID-19 maybe?) to rank in Google so it gets an honorable mention.
Hotel SEO
Google offers a special knowledge panel just for hotels. To get your hotel to show up you need to follow a special set of instructions and have an “integration partner” to provide you rates and availability to Google. Like recipe SEO, the work involves a lot of technical information rather than creative content. There is some talk that there is a specific way to have a better chance at ranking a hotel in Google above others but I tend not to entertain theory and have no first hand experience with this so I will just leave this in honorable mentions until I see some proof of this.
Adult SEO
A special kind of SEO just for Porn!? Not really, but, it is required for someone to be of a certain age (depending on their region of the world) to be able to work with adult content in the first place. I’m not an adult entertainment lawyer so I really don’t know the specifics but I do know that different countries have different laws involving adult content online. It’s the only way I would classify “Adult SEO” as a separate category because, outside of any kind of age requirement, the SEO process is the same.
Search Engine Specific SEO (Google/Bing/Yahoo!/YouTube/etc.)
Not all search engines are created equal and, although they all use similar signals, the weight distribution of these signals can be vastly different so you will see different results in different search engines for the same keyword.
Consult the SEO map to determine which which search engine is most used depending on the region in the world.
There are a lot of SEO “flavors.” Just remember that the main ingredients are all the same.
Schema.org markup (often just called Schema) are tags containing tiny bits of information (microdata) that can be added to HTML to change (and possibly improve) the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs. For example, seeing a 5-star review in an organic listing is a result of Schema.
Schema was created through collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo!
Officially, there is no conclusive evidence that Schema improves rankings. However, good schema that web visitors may find useful could lead to a click. So, in this regard, good schema markup could lead to a better click through rate (CTR) but does CTR increase SEO performance? Not according to what was said last year by Gary Illyes of Google who serves as the head webmaster trends analyst:
“Dwell time, CTR, whatever Fishkin’s new theory (Moz) is, those are generally made up crap. Search is much more simple than people think,” Gary said.
Any time that I personally used schema.org markup (adding reviews in my listings, recipes) I never saw a change in rankings from it solely. For something like recipes, or other pieces of standalone content, schema.org markup can make it easier for Google Search and other major search engines to index and organize properly but that doesn’t equate to good rankings. That only equates to search engines being able to communicate with your content. At the same time, with something like recipes, schema.org markup is practically a requirement since so much detailed and precise information can go into a recipe.
In conclusion, there really isn’t anything that structured data is going to do for a website in terms of SEO. Schema can, however, speed up the search engine indexing process and possibly increase CTR by revealing details that would have been otherwise hidden from a search results page.
Separating fact from opinion has always been a goal for machine learning usage in search quality development. Speculative journalism has it’s place as sharing opinions can be a good thing and can help people develop new ideas and improved systems for all kinds of purposes. It is important to isolate fact from fiction especially with YMYL (Your Money Your Life) searches, which can greatly affect peoples financial, physical, and mental health if bad information is given.
Recently John Mueller spoke on the extent to which machine learning is used in search and it was pretty interesting to learn this new information.
“There are always so many algorithms in play; some are more suitable for ML (Machine Learning) than others. Suitability also requires room to remove bias, allow debugging, allow critical corrections, etc. — in addition to delivering better results.” – John Mueller
If topics are easy to understand and a website has clear and concise content machine learning can do much of the work alone but when concepts get more complicated and searches are extremely open ended as far as intent goes sometimes machine learning, in it’s current state, has to take a back seat and let human intervention take over. Because of this, there is no real negative effect machine learning has on SEO and can actually makes the SEO process quicker by speeding things up if the content being SEO’d is simple and easy to understand.
Overall, it is a relief to hear John tell us that machine learning isn’t always used and it depends on the circumstances since it is one less thing that any SEO has to worry about as far as causing a ranking disturbance.
To many, local SEO (Google Maps, GMB, etc) is a whole other animal that seems even more complex than Google Search (organic results) but, on the contrary, it’s actually simpler…
December of 2004 was a milestone for Google. This is when they filed their Patent for Authoritative Document Identification. The idea behind Authoritative Document Identification was to provide local searches with quality local content.
Authoritative Document Identification as explained directly from the horse’s mouth:
“A system determines documents that are associated with a location, identifies a group of signals associated with each of the documents, and determines authoritativeness of the documents for the location based on the signals.”
Put into context, Google uses four main signals that determine a location for a business. The signals are as follows:
⦁ H1 tag matches the business name.
⦁ The page has many links pointing to it from a number of other pages and/or websites that mention the location and/or the business name.
⦁ The page contains a physical address with a legitimate phone number.
⦁ Business name contained in the URL.
The first two bullet points are standard SEO stuff: Keywords in the appropriate header tags (primarily H1) and backlinks (links from other pages and/or websites). However, It’s the last two that put the “local” in local SEO. Does the page contain a physical address? (no, virtual offices don’t count since they don’t have a dedicated physical address) Does the page contain a dedicated phone number specific to that business?
Simply put, a business needs physical representation of it’s existence, even if it’s a residential location, in order to even have a chance at ranking for local SEO terms (ie. {keyword, city/town, state}) in Google. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to go rent a dedicated office space since people work out of their home all the time and these same people use their home as their business address. However, there can be a problem with using your residence as as your business address if you are looking to target a specific geographical location…
Are you trying to rank for valuable keywords in your little suburban town that has a few 10s of thousands of people in it…or that big city you’re near that has a million? Your dedicated physical address that you use for your GMB page will highly influence this. It’s not to say that it’s impossible to rank for keywords inside a major city if your business is physically located outside of said city, it’s just that it will be much harder to do so compared to actually having the business be physically located inside said city limits.
“So, after I do all of the above I shoot to the top of Google Maps, right?“
Not so fast, partner. You still have to worry about the 3 main factors that Google uses to determine local ranking:
⦁ Relevance
⦁ Distance
⦁ Prominence
Luckily for you, Google has created a special local SEO help page that covers these 3 factors as well as some tips on how to optimize your GMB page (Adding photos, managing reviews, etc). I highly recommend checking out that page and following those instructions to a T. Don’t worry. It’s a short read.
Something that is still overlooked even in 2019: Mobile SEO. I know what you’re thinking. Why am I talking about Mobile SEO in this post. Shouldn’t that be another topic for another day?
“Starting July 1, 2019, mobile-first indexing is enabled by default for all new websites.” (source)
In other words, you need to make sure your website peforms well (loads fast, has visible content, uses responsive design, etc.) on mobile devices as well otherwise your local SEO efforts will be for naught.
Furthermore, “Google uses business information to help surface relevant local search results across Google, such as in Google Maps and Search.”(source) so things like integrating driving directions into your mobile site can actually improve your GMB listing rank and organic search rank.
Mobile SEO is a greater influencer on Google Maps and Search than ever before.
Let’s Get Started (If You Haven’t Done So Already)
Then, you need to properly fill out your newly created GMB page by entering complete data about your business while keeping in mind the following (as mentioned previously in this post):
⦁ H1 tag matches the business name.
⦁ The page contains a physical address with a legitimate phone number.
⦁ Business name contained in the URL.
The fourth bullet point (also mentioned previously in this post) would be ensuring that the page has many links pointing to it from a number of other pages and/or websites (backlinks) that mention the location and/or the business name. This, however, is a whole other journey so I won’t go into depth here. I will be dedicating another post to it in the near future though.
Beyond this it’s a matter of making sure your mobile SEO is in tip-top shape and you should be good to go.
Remember, creating a GMB page is free just like getting an organic listing in Google Search (regardless of rank) is also free. With this in mind, any serious business owner should absolutely incorporate local SEO into their digital marketing strategy.
Since Google’s Penguin 4.0 update bad quality links are now devalued, rather than penalized, by simply not being acknowledged anymore. Prior to this, Google would lower the search rank of pages that bad quality links pointed to as a form of penalty.
2.) Total Number Of Links Is NOT A Ranking Factor
The total number of backlinks a website had used to be a ranking factor. As Google’s algorithm became better at understanding content on webpages this changed. Now, backlink numbers alone don’t mean anything. Moving into 2019, only the authority and relevance of the page that the link is on matters.
3.) Nofollow Links Don’t Pass Authority
Nofollow links aren’t beneficial for ranking purposes, only traffic. As stated by Google verbatim: “In general, we don’t follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links” (source). This is important if you buy links for ranking purposes (which is against Google’s TOS) because you are getting ripped off if they are all nofollow links.
4.) Negative SEO Is Not A Problem Anymore
Thanks to backlink fact #1 negative SEO isn’t a problem anymore. In the past, negative SEO was a vicious ranking strategy that played to Google’s harsh treatment of websites with bad quality backlinks. By creating a bunch of backlinks from web pages and domains that are blacklisted and/or completely irrelevant with spam and pointing them to competitor websites in an effort to lower their search position rather than raise it (thus the name “negative SEO”) for a greater chance of taking their place, a period of rank tanking commenced before Google finally addressed the problem with an update.
5.) Content Should Always Come First
Before you go chasing backlinks (since they are an official ranking factor) content should still always be priority one. Remember: Backlinks are powerful but, without pointing to a page with content that is high qualty, useful, and relevant to the visitor’s search query, they are useless.
Voice search only continues to grow in popularity as it tends to be quicker than typing for most people on the move. Looking for local businesses by speaking into a smartphone is not just a trend, it’s here to stay. Making sure a business can be found with voice searches is imperative to business owners who depend search engine marketing to attract customers.
Of course voice searches aren’t new, but they are considerably improved.
Simply put, that accuracy of voice searching has seen a huge improvement in recent years. Currently, voice searches are more than 20% of searches through Google’s mobile app. It’s predicted that by 2020 more than half of all searches will be vocalized.
A Few Tips On How To Optimize A Website For Voice Search:
On-page keywords should be incorporated into more conversational phrases
Add metadata (when applicable)
Update your Google My Business listings. Voice search looks at local listings as a priority many times (think “{search query} near me”)
Voice search will continue to become popular and, as technology improves, will eventually pass up typed searches.
For anyone that has followed this blog, or is familiar with my search engine marketing expertise, it is understood that I am a “Google guy” meaning that, when it comes to finding things in search engines, I turn to Google every time. However, this doesn’t mean that Google is the only search engine. There’s Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Ebay, LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, and countless others you probably never heard.
When it comes to ranking content in a search engine Google is your best bet due to the sheer number of people who use it and the fact that Google is highly transparent with the core fundamentals of their search engine.
But, what if you wanted to rank an auction page in Ebay? Or, if you are looking for new opportunities in LinkedIn and want your personal profile page to come up first for key searches? SEO is the solution to these problems.
As I stated earlier in this post, Google is highly transparent with the core fundamentals of their search engine meaning they pretty much tell you what you need to do to rank high. Obviously, the execution of their instruction is a whole other ballgame but the fact that the execution is clear makes SEO’ing webpages for Google completely feasible.
So, how do you search engine optimize content for other search engines that provides value and exposure for people and businesses?
Bing SEO
Like with Google, links are a powerful ranking signal that Bing utilizes.
From Bing Webmaster Guidelines:
“Links pointing to your site help Bing discover new pages on your site. Traditionally, it is also regarded as a signal of popularity. The site linking to your content is essentially telling Bing that they trust your content.”
Although Bing search representatives have never commented directly on the complete on-page factors for ranking most seasoned search engine marketers seem to agree that keywords play a stronger role with Bing than with Google. Google uses LSI (latent semantic indexing) so many times the keyword being targeted doesn’t even need to be on-site in an exact match format. With Bing, keywords, exact match key phrases, and exact match domains all seem to carry a lot of weight. It’s as if Bing’s search algorithm is trailing behind Google’s a good 5-10 years.
All in all, a high ranking in Bing pretty much comes from the majority of the same practices as a high ranking in Google does.
Yahoo! SEO
Since October of 2011, Yahoo! Search has been fully powered by Bing. However, over time the search results between the 2 engines have been quite different at times (depending on the search query). Yahoo! is even more tight lipped about their search engine and, since it’s “outsourced” to Bing, Yahoo! probably won’t reveal much on it. If the goal is ranking high in Yahoo! then the best course of action is to focus on ranking high in Bing.
DuckDuckGo SEO
When it comes to privacy DuckDuckGo is the “White Knight” of search engines (or white duck in this case). DuckDuckGo does not store the personal information or the search history of the user nor does it follow it’s users with ads or track users over time. DuckDuckGo has been known to call out Google in this regard. Although, the search volume market share in DuckDuckGo (0.22%) is pitiful compared to Google (72%). It has been slowly growing over the years however. In time DuckDuckGo could prove to be a valuable traffic source.
So, what is known about DuckDuckGo’s ranking algorithm?
Links (go figure).
Directly from DuckDuckGo:
“Nevertheless, the best way to get good rankings (in pretty much all search engines) is to get links from high quality sites like Wikipedia”
There are 2 takeaways from this statement from DuckDuckGo…
First, DuckDuckGo believes that links are so powerful that they even say they matter in all search engines (not just theirs).
Second, Wikipedia is the link example they use. Wikipedia is a nofollow link meaning in Google’s eyes it does not pass authority and therefore it will not help with rankings. This means that nofollow links are not a problem in DuckDuckGo and link building is much easier…for now at least.
eBay SEO
Cassini, eBay’s internal search engine, first emerged in 2013 and with it came a chance of actually being able to SEO an auction listing and increase the chance of the listing showing up first for related keywords. Before 2013, people were mostly in the dark on how eBay’s search engine worked and really couldn’t actively SEO a listing, leaving everything up to eBay.
Cassini ranks listings based on 4 metrics: Item Title, Item Specifics, Category, and Catalogs. These for metrics are influenced by keywords. Using eBay’s keyword research tool, Terapeak, it becomes possible to build a powerful keyword list and implement it into a listing’s HTags (H1-H6) found in the HTML editor, a standard SEO tactic used in other search engines.
LinkedIn SEO
LinkedIn has grown in popularity for business networking in recent years. You can find jobs, employees, and promote your business here making it one of the more useful social media platforms, especially for business development.
Luckily, SEO for LinkedIn is pretty straight forward. SEO’ing a LinkedIn profile page (like any other page that shows up in Google) starts with keyword richness through content. There is a lot of content that can be added to a LinkedIn profile so it’s best to use the space to fill in some good keywords. This includes pictures too. Rather than just a name of a person, putting in decriptive keywords in the file names of pictures uploaded to LinkedIn gets picked up by LinkedIn search algo and helps improve rankings. In other words, naming a profile photo “John Doe” is not nearly as effective as naming it “John Doe – mechanical engineer with 15 years experience” and so on.
Things like posting and growing a network by reaching out to other profiles in the same field also affects ranking. It is widely known that LinkedIn profiles with larger networks show up first in search more reached than ones with smaller networks.
Facebook SEO
The cream of the crop when it comes to social media. SEO for Facebook is the most dynamic. The number one factor is content. It is well known through out today’s digital marketing circles that the more relevant content on a Facebook page, the more exposure it will get for relevant keywords. Don’t worry about getting likes and growing followers. Worry about competitors putting up more relevant, useful content.
On-site keyword SEO practices can effectively be applied as well. For example, naming the page the desired keyword will increase ranking. Regular posting with targetted keywords in each post will further influence rankings and increase the chance of the page getting found.
Instagram SEO
The “social media platform for the kids” is how many seasoned digital marketers look at Instagram since so many Gen Z and even younger Millenials are there. Instagram is photo and video intensive and there is not much room for anything else.
Here are a few basic rules to follow when it comes to SEO for Instagram:
1. Use high quality photos.
2. Use captions. These fields are primed for relevant keywords.
3. Use Hashtags. Again putting keywords in here can greatly increase ranking within the Instagram network.
4. Put content out regularly. Visual content is 90% of what’s on Instagram so putting content out regularly can help.
If a business offers a wide variety of products, listing them on Instagram can help. If it’s a business that provides services such as tax specialists and accounting firms then Instagram will probably not work so well.
Amazon SEO
“A9” is Amazon’s search algorithm. Since Amazon users are looking for products and are more interested in buying rather than just reading and researching (like with Google), A9 really only focuses on 2 main factors: relevance and performance.
Starting with the easier of the 2, relevance is influenced by keywords. The single most important element of Amazon SEO is the product title. The most relevant keywords go. These title keywords can dramatically change the rank of a product listing so getting them right is crucial. After that it’s the backend keywords that users don’t see but Amazon’s algorithm does. This is very similar to Google’s meta tags.
A seller on Amazon has 5 lines that they can insert their backend keywords. Each line has a maximum character input of 50. That’s 250 characters total for backend keywords.
So, once again, good SEO in Amazon starts with a good keyword list.
Performance isn’t as easy to tackle as relevance is when it comes to Amazon SEO. Things like conversion ratio and reviews weigh heavily in this area. Even price can affect your rank (If you charge significantly more or less, do you offer flexible pricing, ie. payment plans, etc).
In conclusion, focus on what you can control in Amazon: Keywords. Relevant keywords on page and in the backend section can go a long way. If a high rank is achieved from this and then subsequently drops look at performance metrics next and make adjustments accordingly.
Ever since Google announced it’s main organic algorithm influencers last year, SEO, something that was too theory based for many traditional marketers, has gained a lot more popularity in the world of digital marketing. Simply put, SEO marketers aren’t playing a “guessing game” when it comes to search engine marketing practices anymore.
Or are they?
It is a fact that links (that aren’t nofollow links) pass authority to other sites thus helping them rank for specific keyword groups related to the desination site’s content. It is also a fact that relative content on a site’s page helps that page rank for specific keywords related to said page’s content. 2 questions are drawn from these facts about how Google’s search engine work:
1. Which links are the most powerful ranking influencers?
2. How much content is needed?
As for the answer to the first question, when checking their backlink profiles, Google has instructed webmasters to question a link’s purpose “Why is the link there?” “Does the link provide any value?” The most common interpretation of this is that if a link is contextual (A link is in a body of content as a helpful resource to the content as a whole or, at the very least, a specific portion of the content) it is powerful. This is theory however and must be taken with a grain of salt. A link is a link (assuming it is not nofollow) and a link anywhere on a page that has authority in Google’s index will pass some of that authority.
The answer to the second question is a bit tougher to answer. There is no suggested length of content, although many swear by the 500+ word rule when writing articles for SEO purpose. The real key to content that helps SEO is relevancy. How relevant is the content to the keyword group you are tyring to rank for? For example, if you are writing about apples, then write about apples, not fruit in general.
Now for the big question: Which is more powerful, content or links?
Moz, the leading third party SEO research company in the world, did a study on ranking content without links and the results were very interesting. Simply put, it’s near impossible to rank content without links. So does this mean links are more powerful? Not necessarily because it IS impossible to rank a blank page with just a bunch of powerul links pointed to it. From this we can gather that content is more important than links. In other words, if I had to pick one and only one I would pick content.
“Create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off” – support.google.com
Google has stated multiple times that they want to see good, relevant content on your website. This alone should tell all SEO professionals that content outweighs links.
In conclusion, both content and links are important and necessary for a page on a website to rank high for related keywords. However, priority one should always be creating high quality, relevant content.
From it’s initial inception, the term “SEM” referred soley to Google’s pay-per-click advertising network that displayed ads at the top of it’s search engine. As time progressed and search engines became more advanced the term began to take on the form of a “catch all” for any kind of marketing done in a search engine (SEO, PPC, Display, etc.). This has led to a lot of confusion amongst people.
In it’s purest form, SEM pretty much involves paying for advertisement in some way or another. An Facebook ad campaign that triggers display advertising (banner ads) in it’s search engine results is a form SEM. SEO’ing an AdWords™ ad in order to improve it’s quality score and, as a result, get a lower bid on the ad is a another example search engine marketing (SEM). The AdWords™ ads themselves are yet another example of SEM, and the one most people are familiar with.
SEM can be an overnight success since traffic starts showing up immediately when people buy ads. However, this can be deceptive because if an SEM campaign is not optimized than ROI can start to suffer.
SEO is about optimizing pages so that they rank naturally. In this way, many people look at SEO as “free advertising” but in truth it has a price as well:
Time.
It can take months to optimize an ecommerce site if it’s comprised of thousands of pages with new one being added regularly. This is because SEO involves monitoring results and seeing what changes on a page equal a postive rank change as well as a negative one.
To get the absolute most out of the potential customer base that passes through Google in large volumes day to day it’s best to run both SEO and SEM campaigns. The most “Google Estate” will be covered this way.
Making sure a business can be found with voice searches is imperative to business owners who depend search engine marketing to attract customers.
Simply put, SEO marketers aren’t playing a “guessing game” when it comes to search engine marketing practices anymore.
