In our previous post, I discussed the second of three concepts and gave a few pointers on how to make your site popular through social media platforms and other networks.  In this post, we will cover the last concept which is authority.

Before we begin, let’s first sort out a definition that remains confusing to some, if not most.  What is SEO, and is it the same as SEM (Search Engine Marketing)?  Fire up Wikipedia and you will find out that SEO can be defined as the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines via “natural” or unpaid (ie. “organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.  SEM on the other hand deals with paid inclusion into the search result set.

One sure way to get listed on the first page of search results is through paid advertising.  However, this can not be a long term strategy unless you have unlimited funds in your marketing budget.  If you don’t, then read on.

If everyone implemented the first two simple concepts (and most sites who take SEO seriously have), we would still end up with search results that just can’t fit on one page.  So what is a search engine to do in this case?  That’s where authority comes in.  Let’s face it, walmart.com or homedepot.com or sony.com to name a few, have more authority than other sites with similar content.  These brand name sites have spent the time and resources to establish their domain trust with users and with search engines.  So getting a link to your site from walmart.com (think supplier) carries more weight than getting a link back from JohnDoeDiscountStore.com.  It’s the quality of the links that matter in this case.  Search engines use that to determine who gets to the first page and who doesn’t after they’ve gone through the first 2 concepts to weed out the riff-ruffs.

Here are guidelines that will help  you acquire quality and relevant links, and increase your Google page rank:

  • Acquire quality and relevant links. The number and quality of backlinks is known as your website’s “Link Popularity” or in Google’s case it’s called “PageRank”.
  • Build a list of potential link request sites
  • Pick a site from the list
  • Check their backlinks. Are they legit, and are their outbound links on topic?
  • Determine the value of the request and send correspondence to solicit link
  • Repeat process

Applying these 3 simple concepts – relevance, popularity, and authority – will go a long way to improving your organic search rankings.  Now go forth and make your SEO projects count for something with these concepts in mind. If you need help, shoot us an email [email protected].