ONLINE MARKETING > SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING > SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Off-The-Page Factors YOU ARE HERE!

POWERFUL OFF-THE-PAGE SEO FACTORS

Is Your Site Link-worthy and Click-worthy?

Expert search engine optimization, based on ethical marketing strategies, ensures long term results, obtaining and retaining qualified traffic, branding and generating the highest return on investment (ROI) of all online marketing strategies.

Beside various on-the-page factors, search engines use certain off-the-page factors in their algorithm as an important component for ranking webpages. The basic idea is that if your website motivate others to link to you, then your site must have quality and relevancy.

Off-the-page factors are important for potential high positions on the search engines, therefore should also be improved in successful search engine optimization. The major among off-the-page factors are link analysis and click-through measurement.

LINK POPULARITY

It's a well known fact that Google uses link popularity as a ranking criterion in its algorithm. Other search engines, such as MSN, Inktomi, AltaVista, HotBot, and Excite have also incorporated popularity factors into their ranking algorithms to produce better relevancy formulae. Search engines can establish a topic of the webpage, as well as it's relevance through detailed analysis of how web pages interlink, and the anchor link text used.

Link popularity is the number of relevant incoming links from other sites to your website. It's determined on the basis of the quality of sites linked to your website, the relevance of those websites to yours, and the quality of the link text. These quality links can be from directories, articles, or websites. Web pages that get more quality links are considered more important and obtain an increase in rankings. Getting just a few links from reputable websites is more useful than many links from unpopular and low quality websites.

CLICKTHROUGH POPULARITY

Clickthrough popularity measures how often your website gets a click when displayed in the search engine results for a specific search. Pages that attract less clicks will be demoted, while pages that attract more will be promoted.

Click popularity also depends on how much time the visitors spend on your website, when coming from the search engine result pages. Obviously, if the content of the website is not relevant:

• no other site would link to it,
• nobody would click through to the site,
• if they click, they wouldn't stick around.

The quality of the content is essential for both link and click popularity of your website..

GOOGLE PAGE RANK

The Google PageRank™ technology is based on the website linkage system. PageRank algorithm evaluates web page relevance through link analysis of each page in the Google index. PageRank is just one part of complex Google algorithm.

If you install the Google toolbar, it displays PageRank in a scale from 0 to 10. PageRank on the toolbar is just an approximation of the real Google PR, and it's relevant only to the particular page viewed, and NOT the whole website.

Here is Google's explanation of its unique system for ranking web pages, PageRank™ (Page Rank Explained):

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query".

Although the total number of sites linking to a page is important, the essence of the PageRank system is the quality and the context of the links (the text around the link). The context of the link was added to block the influence of artificial links, used by spammers. Enhanced Google Algorithm >>

Any reputable search engine, and especially Google, being once again named the Global Brand of the Year and currently responsible for 76% of results on Internet, has providing relevant results to the users as the top priority. That's why the actual search engine algorithm is often enhanced and kept as a secret - not only because of competitors but because of potential spammers! Search Engine Spam >>

User Oriented Design & Ethical Website Marketing Strategies by Distinctia, 2003