The ABCs of SEO: Part Three
You're about to embark on a recap of The ABCs of SEO, as published in the May issue of the TAAR Report. Read part two of this article here.
Components of SEO (continued)
Link Popularity and Inbound Links
5 Site Tweaks that Can Improve Your Rank:
- Offer visitors useful content that's not blatantly stuffed with keywords
- Keep your site clean and fast-loading
- Try to build links with other sites within your industry
- Check your site for technical errors (pages that don't load) and duplicate content (e.g. two identical or closely-related articles)
- Maintain a well-organized site map
Link popularity is classified as how many inbound links you have to your site. Inbound links are formed when someone else links to your site from theirs.
For example, if ParachuteInsurance.com found a good car insurance article on InsureMe.com, they might link to it from their site. And spiders like links. To the spider, links are like votes (hence the term “link popularity”). They signify that people have found your site valuable, and will then rank it higher when someone enters a search term relevant to your site.
The caveat: link popularity isn’t a true democracy. I talked to James Omdahl, our in-house marketing strategist and lead writer for the InsureMe Affiliate Blog, and he explained it like this:
If you’re looking at link popularity like voting, you have to understand that some voters carry more weight than others. If you have a web site that a lot of people have pointed links to, like CNN.com or some government web site, those sites will pull more weight with a search engine than a site that has gotten little recognition.
In other words, if CNN links to the same auto insurance article as ParachuteInsurance, it will have a more dramatic effect on InsureMe’s site rank.
Other Factors
In addition to keyword relevancy and link popularity, those experienced in SEO have pinpointed a handful of others site characteristics that spiders look at.
These include:
- Uniqueness of content
- Freshness of content (how often the content is updated)
- Title tag (text displayed at the top of a browser window)
- Clean web site code
- Indexible content (words on the page versus images)
As you can see from the list, search engines put quite an emphasis on content. Build a clean web site chock-full of well-written articles, and you’ll be well on your way to appealing to search engines and building links from other web sites.
Stay tuned for the conclusion of The ABCs of SEO to learn tips for outsourcing your SEO efforts (instead of doing them yourself!).
