Google has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1993. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, once reported that Google considered over 200 factors to determine which websites ranked higher in the results. Today, Google has well over 200 factors. Google evaluates how users behave on your website, how many links point to your website, how trustworthy these linking websites are, how many social mentions your brand has, how relevant your page is, how old your website is, how fast your website is is loading… the list goes on. Does this mean that getting top rankings on Google is impossible or difficult? nope In fact, you can have the advantage. Google's algorithm is complex, but you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand how it works. In fact, it can be ridiculously easy if you just remember four principles. With these four principles, you can determine why one website ranks higher than another, or what you need to do to rank your website higher than a competitor. These four principles sum up what Google is now focusing on in its algorithm and are the most powerful strategies SEO professionals use to their advantage to gain rankings.
Authority, trust, relevance & user behavior. Four powerful SEO strategies explained.
The four areas of focus are: Trust, Authority, Relevance, and User Behavior.
1. Trust.
Trust is at the heart of Google's major changes and updates over the past few years. Google wants to keep untrustworthy, poor-quality websites out of search results and keep high-quality, reputable websites at the top. When your website has quality content and backlinks from reputable sources, your website is more likely to be considered a trusted source and more likely to Rank Higher in search results.
2. Authority Once the most popular SEO strategy, authority is still powerful but is now best used in tandem with the other two principles. Authority is the overall strength of your website in your market. For example, authority is almost a numbers game: if your website has a thousand Social Media Followers and backlinks and your competitors only have fifty social media followers and backlinks, you are likely to rank higher.
3. Relevance.
Google looks at the contextual relevance of a page and rewards relevant pages with higher rankings. This levels the playing field a bit and might explain why a niche site or local business can often rank higher than a Wikipedia article. You can use this to your advantage by filling your website's content with relevant content and using the on-page SEO techniques described in later chapters to give Google a nudge to see that your website is relevant to your market is relevant. You can rank higher with fewer links by focusing on link building from relevant sites. Increasing relevance in this way is a powerful strategy and can lead to high rankings in competitive areas.
4. User Conduct/Behavior.
Users stick to your content like glue? Or are they visiting and leaving your site faster than Usain Bolt?... User behavior on your site is currently the strongest factor in Google's algorithm. You can take advantage of this by improving the user experience.
