The Steps of SEO Part 2

We discussed yesterday the importance of a LSI and relevant structured website that has tons of content. Now its time to take a look at other fundamental foundations to a successful SEO campaign.

Website Trust

Remember that search engines are created to make the lives of humans easier on the internet. Therefore, like humans, trust needs to be established before search engines will deem a website credible. This wasn’t always the case but as been for the past year or so. Establishing website trust can be found in the following variables.

Age of Domain

A websites age is a tremendous part of the Google algorithm. Why? So that websites can’t just pop out of nowhere and get first place positions on keywords. I think that this is good and bad, good because under initial impressions that seems like a great idea. Bad because anyone can purchase an aged domain and cheat off of the system. What’s the point of me telling you this? If/When possible use an aged domain, purchase one when needed! That is of course unless you don’t mind achieving results for months to come and longer for those more competitive keyword phrases. With the Age of the Domain comes the significance of Link Age.

Link Age

Link age is simply another variable within a websites trust rank credibility. As incoming links count as votes, older and more aged ones count as a great credibility to your website. Running with the idea of human interaction with a search engine in mind, understand that once trust rank is established via the search engines you will begin to notice the benefits. These benefits consist of faster indexing, think minutes/hours instead of days or weeks. This will be great because you can begin to see instant results for keywords you are trying to target, rather then weeks or months.

Established Authority/Trust Rank Now What?

So now you have established authority and trust rank with the search engines, how can you get the most out of that? Now its time to begin to interlink different portions of your website to help filter the pagerank successfully. Assuming that you have established your website with the correct structure, now its time to interlink portions of your site that are relevant to each other and where PageRank is needed. For whatever reason you may have a page or article that you want to have more exposure on the search engines. Assuming that you have a similar and relevant document somewhere on your site it’s time to do an internal link within the actual article. Let’s assume you wrote an article a long time ago on fly fishing, this article has been doing well for search engine results for a given keyword and has some great pagerank. Now lets assume your an affiliate for a sports fishing pole company and they just released a fantastic new product. You decided to create a review page for a new line of fishing poles with an affiliate link to their website, since its a new page on your site you want it to begin popping for that given keyword. Go back to the old article and edit it with a link to the sports fishing pole review page that you just created WITHIN the article. This way you accomplish having a relevant incoming link from an already authoritative portion of your website. A win/win situation within the SEO world.

Choosing the Right Keywords

It’s absolutely imperative to do some keyword research for the articles and pages of your website. Targeting keywords that are obscure and extremely long tailed is pointless! So make sure that you have established keywords that not only you can rank for, but that have traffic.

Remember that not all keywords are created equal, what might ‘sound’ good in your head might not actually be good. So make sure that your keywords that you are trying to target are not extremely long tailed and are actually searched with enough traffic to make it worth while.

A websites main goal should be to understand the true reason why someone would want to visit your site. This could be an answer to a problem that they may be having, or by creating a problem/solution based keywords to align with the content that you have created around those keywords.

Evidence of Trust Rank Increase

Determining when you have gained enough trust rank is essential to planning other portions of your SEO campaign. Make sure you are watching your SERP rankings to determine when that trust rank has finally been established. This typically occurs when your website has been hovering around the 30 or so mark and suddenly jumps to positions 5-12 for many different keywords.

Another example is when you rank for a few positions for a given keyword. This shows that your domain has enough credibility and that the keywords on your pages may begin ranking. Also you will begin to notice that articles that you wrote with one or maybe two keywords in mind are suddenly ranking for 15 or 20 separate keywords. The search engines have now deemed your site a success and have begun to index your sites and rank your sites for additional keywords.

Attempting to gauge when a website will earn trust is dependent on many factors, although the main factors are as follows. The structure of your site, the age of the links, the age of the article page, how frequently you update your website and your off page inbound link structure.

[tags]trust rank, website trust, keyword trust rank, ranking well in search engine[/tags]