Web Traffic: SEO and Links

You want people to visit your website, and one of the important ways to get these visits is from the search engines. By some counts, around 70% of all website visitors come from search engines. So obviously getting help from the search engines can make a big difference to the success or failure of your site.

Question 1: To score well with the search engines you need to impress them that your site is worth visiting. OK, so how do you do that?

Answer: You have to convince them that your site is an important and helpful resource for specific search terms.

Question 2: How do the search engines determine what is an important and helpful resource for a specific search terms?

Answer: They evaluate each and every web page in terms of its "quality".

Question 3: How do the search engines determine quality?

Answer: There are two important factors: on-page content, and inbound links.

Question 4: What do you mean by "on-page conent"?

Answer: The text on every web page is analyzed to determine what that page is about. The search engines look for "keywords". They assume when specific keywords are mentioned in a page then that is what the page is about.

Question 5: How is the "quality" of a page's content determined?

Answer: This gets a bit trickier. There are many factors considered by the search engines, but the most basic are the amount of text on the page that focuses on specific keywords, and the presence of specific keywords in critical places that the search engines assume are important places (e.g., the title tag, the main headline, the first bit of text on the page, etc.)

Question 6: How else is the "quality" of a page's content determined?

Answer: In-bound links. When the search engines see a link pointing from an outside site to a page on your site, they assume that means your page is important enough to be considered a resource worth looking at. The more links you have pointing at your page, the more important your page is considered and the higher it will rank when people search for the type of content your page is about.

Question 7: So links help the search engines determine the quality of websites?

Answer: Yes. In the eyes of the search engines - especially Google - links are like "votes". When someone links to your site the search engines assume that is like saying "this is a worthwhile resource worth looking at." The more "votes" like this you get, the more likely the search engines are to consider your site a worthwhile resource.

Question 8: So is that the whole story on links?

Answer: No. Not all links are given the same weight by the search engines. And some links never get discovered because they are on pages that are never visited by the search engines. So you don't get credit for those links.

I'll say more about linking strategies in the next post.

Resources:

Getting Traffic: Two Types of Traffic

Step By Step SEO - Building a Neighborhood

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