What is good for the searcher is good for the search engine
More than anything else, the key to success online comes down to one thing, relevancy.
The key to a keyword’s high quality score in PPC? Relevancy.
The key to a landing page’s high conversion rate? Relevancy.
The key to an ad’s high click through rate? Relevancy
The key to a listing’s high position in the search results? Relevancy.
Relevancy is the key to ALL online marketing –– but particularly so to SEO.
Let’s take a look at how relevancy plays an influential part in SEO:
End-users want to find relevant content when they type a search query into the search engine. In turn, the search engine wants to provide relevant results to that search. If you want your website to be found in those search results, your website must be relevant.
Most people think solely of keywords when they think of relevancy but relevancy is so much more than just matching keywords.
An example of what relevancy is:
• Page titles that clearly describes a page’s fundamental content in a readable manner.
• Logical and organized structure themes:
• Easy and clear navigation that follows the structured theme.
• Descriptive anchor text in links.
• Images with alternative descriptive text.
• Indicators of authority and trust:
- Easy to find contact information.
- Toll-free number.
- Privacy policy.
- References, associations and affiliations (you are known by the company you keep).
An example of what relevancy is NOT:
• Keyword stuffing.
• Cloaking.
• Duplicate page titles.
• Duplicate content.
• Overly general content.
• Thin content with little text and heavy use of graphics.
• Overly optimized content.
• Long URLs of database-generated query string parameters.
• Poor grammar and spelling.
To succeed in search, you must be relevant. To be relevant, your site must be designed with the user in mind first, because doing what’s right for the user is a large part of doing what’s right for the search engine.
what does cloaking mean?
Thanks,
Sue
Hi Sue. Great question.
“Cloaking” is when a website provides certain content to the search engine spiders for indexing but then provides different content to a human viewing the website. Think of it as “bait and switch” with the content.
Some websites attempt to do this so that they can get traffic from the search engines on really popular search terms and then send that traffic to a web page that is about something that is less popular. While the content might have appeared relevant to the search engine spider, to the human it wasn’t.
Suffice to say, it creates a poor user experience and likely will not generate many leads or conversions for the website. Additionally, it is a technique that will get the website banned from the search engines, when they realize that cloaking has been involved.
So why would a website owner or business do this? Often times, the business owner didn’t even realize that cloaking techniques had been applied to their website. They simply hired some company that promised that they could generate them a lot of search traffic in short order with some mystical sounding “black-hat” techniques. By the time the business owner realizes that all of the traffic their website is getting is for Miley Cyrus it’s too late and then ALL traffic stops as the website is dropped from the search engines, entirely. The company that they had hired to generate the search traffic has now cashed the check and are long gone.
So how could the business have avoided this situation? By working with a well established agency that would work closely with the business to ensure that higher goals than just “generate traffic” were in place.
A good agency will ensure that the website uses compelling content that is relevant to both the search engine and the searcher. This will provide a foundation for the website to achieve long term rankings in the search result pages for relevant search terms. This in-turn will generate the kind of traffic that converts for the business and achieves the long-term business goals. Now that’s relevant.
-Robert