Kev Price SEO

In the recent Google article posted in the NY times Mr Singhal talks about PageRank being one of around 200 ’signals’ that are used to measure pages.

I think as an SEO community we could probably come up with that many measurables.

So, I’ll begin the list by focusing on what appears to be measured within the domain. i.e. many things that we as the people creating the page can be directly in control of.

1. Domain name

In my opinion the most important place for your keywords to be found.

Google is becoming or has already become the new http:// . Rather than typing a domain name into navigation bar people are more often typing a domain or partial domain into Google to find the site. So if they put in your keywords into a search engine it can assume that they are trying to find your domain.

Another added and extremely important reason for keywords in your domain are that in the majority of cases people will use your domain name as the anchor text in a link to you. So it is a sure fire way to get links pointing to you with keywords you are targeting.

Tip - if you are wanting to find which other domains are targeting your terms in their URL do a search for e.g: allinurl: “seo tips”

2. Age of the page/domain

Age of the page and domain seems to be a huge factor in determining trust and weight of a site. This is not so easily controlled and can be a pain when trying to rank brand new sites as they need time to build up trust. One way that people have been getting around this recently is by renting out pages on .edu domains with high trust to get their content ranked.

This works because trust and authority are spread throughout a domain rather than a page.

3. Title tags

Google pay special attention to title tags, I would say after the domain this is the most important place to get your keywords. When Google lists you in the SERPs it’s this tag that it uses as a link.

Keywords in this tag gain you relevance and the term searched for will go bold when displayed within the results giving you affordance and more likely click-throughs.

Tip - to find other sites targeting your keywords in their title tags do a search for e.g: allintitle: “seo tips”

4. Meta tags

Meta tags such as keywords and description went the way of the dodo way back in the 90’s. Meta tags are useful for notifying bots not to index and letting browsers know which language you are using or character encoding.

Description tags are sometimes used below the title tag link in SERPs but are considered far too biased by search engines to be used for ranking. If you cannot guarantee unique descriptions or keywords I would recommend removing them completely so as not to be accused of keyword stuffing.

5. Page summary.

What I mean by this is, can you tell what the content of the page is about by only reading the title and h1 - h6 tags. Do they relate to each other in a logical order? Are they connected and along the same semantic themes? Are they all relevant to the title?

Obviously the lower down the order of H tags the less important they become, however i always try to make sure I have an H1 tag and usually at least one h2.

The H1 tag is often the same as your title tag but without your brandname.

The body text of your page should relate to the same themes as your titles. Google have amazing algorithms that understand semantics. Don’t go stuffing your keywords or measuring keyword density. Write naturally on the theme of the page using synonyms and linking outwards where relevant.

6. Outgoing links

Outgoing links benefit you by giving you control over the community that you are placing yourself within. be careful of the way in which you link. If you link out to a badly rated site or a spam site you can be tarnished by association. Also don’t go linking out to other sites using your own targeted keywords as this will tell the search engines that you see them as an authority on that topic above yourself. It will also give you competition for your own keywords.

There are a great deal more items on a domain and within a domain to be measured. Thats my top six.

Part two will more than likely focus on information architecture and the passing of link love around your site before we move onto off domain signals of relevance.