A lot of people ask me questions that pertain to seo as to asking me if there is one thing that makes a difference in getting higher rankings. My quickest answer is that the search engines, specifically Google are not dumb. It surprises me in how so many people discount the credibility and intelligence of the search engineers that work behind the scenes of a search engine company.
Search engines have to look at more than 1 thing, or 5 things, or even 10 things in order to determine the importance and relevance of a webpage. Google has come out and told us that they look at over 200 factors when determining the importance of a page. So common sense tells you that if you are going to do SEO, there is not just 1, 5, or even 10 things that you have to look at.
In order to rank well and be in good standing with the search engines you have to have a bunch of things that work in concert together. You just can’t say that you built a good site and put in some meta data on the site and say you did seo, or build all of you links from social bookmarking, or just rely on having a lot of traffic and usage data to help.
You have to have a lot of things that are working in conjunction with each other. Some factors do have more weight in the algorithm than others, but that does not mean that the ones with less weight are less important.
For example, there have been several questions about usage data and if more people click on your listing in the results then you are guaranteed to rank higher. Common sense tells you that if that was the case then website owners would simply hire people to search in Google and click on their listings in the results, kind of like the click fraud that happens in the PPC space. Usage data and click through rates do have some weight in the seo factors, but not simply by itself.
This is where there must be a bunch of other things in concert together and everything must work together like:
- Quality Code
- Optimized On Page Content
- Social Media
- Are people talking about you in twitter, facebook, news sites, etc.
- Links that point back to your site and the quality of the links
- How old is the site
- How fast does in grow
- How many people use the site
- How do people find the site
- How big is the site
- What is the architecture of the site
- And several other things
There are so many things that a search engine has to look at in order to make quality determinations as to how important and relevant a page is according to some keyword phrase that they have to look at a lot of things and see if they back each other up. This is why one of the biggest things in performing seo is to look natural and have a great diversity, meaning not everything is geared to only 1 thing, like building links through only directories.
A quality SEO campaign should consist of having a great website with great coding and design, great architecture, great usability, tons of traffic, tons of inbound links over time and different sources. Yeah you would want all inbound links to be from a PR4 page or above, but that would look fishy. Make sure you put your SEO orchestra together so the sound works perfectly together, when this happens you will achieve great rankings and success.
Be the conductor of your SEO Concert so you can control how everything sounds, or in this case how everything ranks.
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