Search Engines look at hundreds of factors when ranking websites but they fall into two basic categories;
- Website relevancy (mostly concerned with on-site factors)
- Website authority (mostly concerned with off-site factors)
When someone makes a search query on Google (or another search engine), they first determine which sites in their index are relevant to the query then they rank the websites based on a combination of their degree of relevancy and their level of authority or trustworthiness. The higher ranking websites have the best combination of high relevancy and high authority.
Website Relevancy
Increasing your website relevancy involves determining which are the best keywords to target (keyword research) then incorporating them into your webpages in the right places (website optimisation), namely;
- Page Titles
- Page Headings
- URLs
- Content
- Img names and alt tags
If your industry, or the keywords you choose to target, have very low competition then working on your website relevancy (on-site SEO) may be all that you have to do. If a search engine finds that several websites are relevant for the same search query (keyword), it needs to decide which website it should rank higher and which lower, it does this by looking at the ‘authority’ of the different websites. The more competitive your market is, the more you have to work on increasing your website authority.
Website Authority
Search engines look at many different factors to determine a website’s authority but the most important ones are the quality and quantity of incoming links from other websites.
Once you have your website relevancy under control, its time to start trying to get links to your webpages (link building). There area many techniques and strategies for link building. We’ve tried to categorise and explain many of them in our link building section (particularly in the articles linked from this bottom of this section).
Common SEO Questions & Answers
Here are some common SEO questions and their answers.
Have a question that isn’t covered here?
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