How Popular Are You?
Some people appear to be successful at whatever they do. Understanding that they website is just an extension of their business (or who they are), they form both real world connections with other businesses and people. They understand that word of mouth and influence are more powerful than just building a website and hoping that people will find you.
Years ago, I worked on a website for a local painting company. She managed to gain valuable links from local paint stores and suppliers by little things like featuring their products in photos of homes that were recently painted. She also created a human connection by giving some store managers a night at a hockey game. She said to me, “Great seats at a hockey game mean a lot to a manager who has an average salary. It’s my way of showing appreciation, and when someone asks about a painting company, he will recommend my business first.”I think she was right. She also made herself out to be an expert in her field online by writing articles that were featured in interior decorating magazines.
While everyone does not have to skills to socialize and write online, you have skills that are unique to your business. You can also hire others much more talented than you to fill the gaps. The important thing is to have a story that people can believe in.
How can you be number 1 in Google?
To move your website from the position that it’s in now to the placement that you want later, you need to be aware of your sites internal linking structure and its external links.
The Thigh Bone’s Connected to the Hip Bone
When you build a website it has a unique architecture. Ideally, you want the majority of pages to link to the main pages of your site. Often web pages that have poor position, have an internal link structure that does not adequately communicate to Google that specific pages are more important than others. In the “Skeleton Dance” from childhood, you simply named the links between specific bones. If your body were a website, each part of your body would connect to the your brain (or your homepage), your heart and lungs. Your body’s nervous system would be something akin to links that connect pages to one another. Often, SEO will involve an attempt to restructure the internal link structure of your website so it accurately presents your businesses’ priorities.
Would you sign my yearbook?
Several years ago, when you graduated, you would ask your friends to sign your yearbook. Popular kids gained so many signatures in their books that it was difficult to approach them. Unpopular kids had few photos. You could also tell by the number of photos, the number of times that you appeared on teams and social clubs as well as mentions in the honor roll how popular you are. Popular people even get great comments from their peers and teachers. Everything goes in your favour when you’re famous.
What is PageRank?
The founders of the PageRank algorithm at Google, decided to organize websites according to the number of websites that rank to them as well as the types of words that were used to form those associations. These external links that point to your website can be used to verify the intent of your website. For example, suppose you met a beautiful blond girl with blue at a party who told you that she was a member of the debating team and a cheerleader in high school. But, when you talk your co-workers who went to school with her, you find out the following: she’s really a brunette who has buckteeth, she never completed high school, and she was arrested for shoplifting (and was the talk of the neigbourhood). The people you know who have a connection to her, have only negative (attributions or) things to say about her.
Being human, you might decide to ignore all the advice that the algorithms around you give you about the person. But, Google won’t make the same mistakes that humans do. If you say that your website sells “bicycle” and every website that links to you says “RipOff Report,” you are not a credible bicycle monger.
What about the quality of the advice you receive?
After you speak with her, you realize that the people who had bad things to say about her, were bullies who made her high school experience a living hell. To graduate, her parents moved her to a private school and then used home schooling and private tutors. She admits to changing her appearance to feel better about herself. She says that once she fixed her teeth and became a blond, job offers and opportunities started to come her way.
Google, similarly, will evaluate the quality of the websites that link to you. Some considerations that may affect whether your site ranks well are as follows: 1) does the site rank well for its chosen terms; 2) does the page that links to you have an any relevance to what you do; 3) is the link from an image or a word; 4) are the words used in the link relevant to what you do; 5) does the link appear natural or does it appear that you did it yourself; 6) is the link from a site that loads quickly or slowly; 7) does the website that links to you have a penalty; 8) are your links all from the same IP address (or website location); 9) are the links from a country in the same geographic location as your target audience; and 10) is the link located at the top or bottom of the page.
You can see how evaluating the quality of links can quickly help you to identify if a person is credible or not. When people apply to become Supreme Court judges in the United States, you may observe a similar vetting process occurring in real time where politicians and the media dig into a person’s background to determine if they are who they say they are. This painfully grueling vetting process helps democracy work. Search engines evaluate the websites that link to you to place your website from position 1 to 1 million online. Securing links from credible sources can help you to be number 1 in google. Link optimization is an important part of SEO.