Your content’s chances of being found organically will rise as long as you concentrate on these three pillars in your SEO marketing strategy.
According to experienced SEOs, the most successful websites in organic search have the correct blend of high-level basics and technical know-how.
In Google’s Search Rater Quality Guidelines, the concept of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) has received a lot of attention in recent years.
There is a growing consensus that these are the most fundamental elements of SEO.
Although SEO strategy E-A-T may be helpful for some websites, it only focuses on content.
A comprehensive SEO strategy must contain more.
Throughout the years, I’ve come to believe that SEO can be boiled down to a simple three-step process:
1.Authority
2.Relevance
3.Experience is a third factor to consider.
More traffic will come from search engines and people if a site pays special attention to all three of these factors.
Notice that one of my E-A-T categories, Authority, overlaps with another category.
And that’s because a site or page is authoritative in my opinion if it has both expertise and trustworthiness in spades.
A-R-E categories should be examined in detail to understand how they fit into a comprehensive SEO strategy.
1.Authority
The value or weight assigned to a page based on a search query is known as “authority” in SEO.
Modern search engines like Google employ a variety of elements to determine a webpage’s authority.
If you’re looking for a specific solution, Google wants to show you results that are most likely to fulfill your needs.
Providing the most authoritative results for users’ searches is a priority for Google, as people who are satisfied with the results they receive are more likely to return to Google and so expose themselves to more of Google’s advertising.
Yes! It’s on the first place.
Search engines had to first assess the authority of webpages.
Early search engines used human judges, but as the internet grew, this proved impractical.
Google surpassed all competitors because its founders, Page and Brin, invented PageRank, which uses links from other websites to determine a page’s authority.
Other authoritative sites “voted” for pages they saw as dependable and relevant to their users, Page and Brin realized.
Links are treated by search engines like scholarly citations. The more relevant scientific publications cite a source document, the better.
Also considered are the citing sources’ relative authority and reliability.
Given the prevalence of hyperlinks on the internet, authority was the easiest of our three main categories to break.
Relevance and user experience would be addressed later when machine learning/AI algorithms improved.
Authority From Links
Using web links as a ranking criteria made Google the dominating search engine in a short time.
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine was written by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
This paper’s key finding was that the web is made up of documents linked together.
This meant that publishers would only link to sites that were truly valuable to their readers.
Links to third-party sites are akin to “votes,” with each vote supporting the linked page as one of the greatest online resources for a certain topic.
In theory, the more votes you get, the better and more authoritative you are to a search engine.
PageRank
Early on in Google’s history, a big part of its algorithm was based on the idea of Page Rank, which is how important pages are judged based on the number of links they get.
When there are many good links that point to your page, it will have more Page Rank. This means that in theory, it will be more likely to show up high in search results than some other pages that don’t have as many good links.
Whenever a page links to some other page, it gives some of its Page Rank to that other page.
Thus, the more and better links a page gets, the more Page Rank it gets.
Link Equality
More votes are better, then?
The idea is correct, but it’s not that simple.
There are a lot of different PageRank scores, and they range from a base number of one to scores that could be trillions.
Pages with a high PageRank can pass a lot more than low-Page Rank pages. A link from one page can be worth more than one million times more than a link from another page. Also several links, can rank lower than one good link. (That’s why authority is important)
Let’s use our intuition briefly.
Imagine a page selling frying pans obtaining two links. Both are from Miranda’s Kitchen Shop and Amazon.
Which one would you appreciate more as a user? We, as users, realize Amazon’s superiority.
Amazon, for example, has a considerably stronger web presence (and higher Page Rank) than every site offering kitchen pans.
So it has a higher Page Rank and can pass it on to the pages it links to.
Notably, Google’s algorithms have grown far from the initial PageRank premise.
It is important to note that the way links are analyzed has changed significantly in recent years.
Trust
Many people discuss the importance of trust in search rankings and link quality.
For the record, Google maintains it doesn’t apply trust to links (or ranking), so take those conversations with a grain of salt.
This debate started over a Yahoo patent on TrustRank.
The notion was that the fewer clicks it took to get from one site to another, the more reputable your site was.
Google has long denied using this measure.
However, Google was received a patent in April 2018 for analyzing link credibility. But a patent doesn’t mean it’s used in practice. (Learn more for Search Engine Optimization History here.)
By using principle of trusted links to analyze the reliability of a website as a provider of a link is not a poor decision.
A link source isn’t good if they perform any of the following:
-Sell links
-Have poor content.
-Not credible.
It’s important to know what not to do with your SEO strategy. Google may not calculate trust the like you do, but another component of their system is likely to devalue the link.
2. Relevance
You must be connected to the topic.
The strength of links as a ranking element and shows how relevancy affects a link’s worth.
Consider a used Range Rover page on a website. Assume it gets a connection from Car and Driver shops. That’s a big deal.
Consider it intuitively. Is it possible that shops has Range Rover knowledge? Sure, they do.
Imaging a link to that Range Rover from a sports website. What do you think?
Not as beneficial, because Google has less proof that the sports website knows a lot about used Range Rovers.
In brief, the value of a link depends on the linking page and site’s significance.
Anchor Text
Google also values anchor text in links.
The anchor text tells Google what the linked page’s content is about.
For example, if the anchor text is “barbie dolls” and the website is about that, the anchor text and link confirm that.
Thus, links evaluate both the page’s relevance and its authority.
But you shouldn’t build links to your page that all use the same anchor text, which is your main keyword.
Google also checks for indicators of human link manipulation for SEO.
One simple clue is if your anchor text appears to be edited.
Internal Links
Google is increasingly using internal links to assess a site’s topical relevance.
Internal links connecting similar content indicate Google that you have the issue covered well, with pages on many facets.
Creating external links is just as crucial as creating inbound links.
This relates to your site’s structure.
Consider where your pages fit in your site’s hierarchy. User-friendly content is likely to be valuable to search engines.
3.Expirience
As shown above, Google began by prioritizing pages based on authority, then relevancy.
The third evolution was user experience evaluation.
In fact, many SEOs (including myself) prefer to refer to SEO as “Search Experience Optimization” (SEO).
Google understood that customers were looking for more than just authority and relevance while searching. Users expect a decent experience on Google’s pages and sites.
What is “excellent user experience”? It comprises at least:
•The page the searcher landed on is what they expected to see. No gimmicks.
•The landing page’s content directly answers the user’s question.
•The information is enough to answer the user’s question, and there are links to related sources and topics.
• Easily identifiable relevant content and page elements.
Also, a lot of the tips above for making good content also apply to making the user experience better.
In general, Google is going to rank pages that answer queries and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. That is good to be implemented in the SEO strategy too.
Content
The content of a page is, of course, the most significant aspect of its relevance.
Most SEOs know that analyzing content’s relevancy to a query requires more than just knowing the user’s keywords.
Recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and machine learning have greatly improved search engines’ ability to judge page content.
What does Google check for when deciding which queries a page must be suitable for?
While keyword stuffing is no longer an efficient SEO strategy, having specific words on a website still matters. My organization has many case studies showing that simply adding key terms found in top-ranking articles on a topic can improve organic traffic.
Top-ranking sites usually discuss a topic in depth. Their material covers the issue adequately and/or links to/from pages that assist fill it out.
Structure: Elements like H1…H2…H3 and bolded topic headings may assist Google determine a page’s relevancy and coverage.
Content Marketing Plan
Last but not least, develop a content marketing strategy.
Don’t just start doing random things.
Examine what your competitors are doing so that you can invest in content marketing that will yield a great ROI.
One method is to use tools to extract their backlink profiles.
By knowing what links they receive, you can determine what links you have to get to defeat them.
Take the time to map out which links go to which pages on the competitors’ sites, and what each page ranks for.
This kind of in-depth analysis will help you plan your strategy and figure out which keywords you might be able to rank for.
It’s worth it!
Examine the content plans of competitors.
Learn what they do and think about what else you can do differently.
Focus on creating content that is highly sought after by your potential customers.
This is another time well spent.
All in one
Search engines want satisfied people who return to them with questions or needs.
They build and sustain satisfaction by delivering the best possible answers to questions or needs.
In order to keep their users happy, search engines need to know and figure out the relative authority of each webpage. To become an authority, you need to make content that is very helpful, interesting, or fun for your visitors. Meet the human desire for reliable authority; search engines are always developing.
As was already said, you need to have great content if you want to get links that will help you rank high for relevant searches.
Your site’s content can be linked to or related. High-quality content from other sites can be published with links back to your site.
Focusing on the three pillars of SEO—authority, relevance, and experience—will help your content get more exposure and links.
Now that you know everything about SEO strategy, get to work!
