A lot of people look at Search Engine Optimization as if it were a bit rocket science mixed together with a dash of voodoo. If somebody pays me to SEO their site, I make a few highly scientific recommendations (that you wouldn’t be able to understand, just trust me on this one), then mix up a simple magic potion and POOF, we are now number one. While I truly believe that SEO boils down to two simple factors, the reality is that I am just not that good at magic. The two factors that I rely on to win competitive search phrases are keyword relevance and topic authority.

While both keyword relevance and topic authority are required to rank for a competitive keyword phrase, keyword relevance is by far the most important. No matter how many incoming links your site has, if it is not relevant to the keyword query, it will not show up in the results. There are many, many tactics to increasing the relevancy of your web site including adjusting your title tags, rewording your page content, altering your internal linking structure, creating content silos, building new pages and the proper use of markup tags like strong and em. Some advanced tactics include reducing the amount of layout code and Javascript on a page to rearranging your source code so that your content appears before something like a menu or contact form. Depending on your web site and the competitiveness of your target keyword phrases, this part of the SEO process can be anywhere from tweaking a few page titles to performing a complete overhaul on your web site.

The challenge in SEO is that no matter what you do to your web site, you can only become so relevant for a keyword phrase before you optimize yourself outside the bounds of what is considered normal for your keyword phrase. Therefore, topic authority is used to determine which of the relevant web sites returned in a search query will show up at the top. Authority is gained on the Internet through incoming hyper links. When a third party site sends a link your way, it’s like they’re saying “hey this guy is cool, I vouch for him”. When the link is coming from a site whose topic is focused on your keyword, it counts a little bit more. When the site is in your topic of choice and it has a lot of authority from its own incoming links, it’s even better. In other words, the relevant site with the most incoming links wins. Now in reality, there are a lot of other factors involved such as link anchor text, geographic location of the linking site, link variation and on and on.

While the fundamentals of what makes a web site rank well for a keyword phrase are incredibly simple, the implementation of these ideas can get incredibly complex. My next few blog posts will be focused on some of the logistics of building relevancy and building authority.

Read part 2 - On Page SEO: Building Keyword Relevance