Take just a moment… remember a time without Internet and search engines. It was a simpler life… with lemonade stands and drive in movies. What did we do if we needed information? The norm was newspapers, radio and a nightly newscast.

 

But let’s say you wanted to find out more about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. You would have to head to the library or a school to ask a teacher or professor – there was no vast internet with all the answers.

 

For each scenario, a decision about authority was made. You considered the connection of your information source to the outcome of receiving a good answer. In other words: You want the most authoritative answer, which comes from the most authoritative source.

 

Today, sometimes we need more than information. Sometimes we need products or services. Everyone was well aware that the World Wide Web was going to become the major warehouse for human knowledge – not to mention the principal source for products and services and so much more. The requirement for search engines was inevitable. In Part I of this summer series, we will explore the first pillar of a strong SEO foundation – authority.

 

Search engines provide the bridge to connect us with authoritative sources answer our questions and help with our needs. Current search engines utilize complex algorithms to find, read and discover the relevance of web pages. Those pages are then matched with search queries looking for the information they contain.

 

To keep it real, Google operates with hundreds of factors when evaluating the authority and relevance of web pages. Search engines evaluate authority by the relevance of content and that content’s external citation authority – links.

 

Links

• Associates relevant topics with the page
• Realize the page and adds it to its index
• External links help validate the level of authority of the page for any given topic

 

Links have been the primary indicator used since the invention of PageRank. When links are relevant to the content and are a value-add to your overall information in a blog, you have matched your information and intent to a reader’s requirements and – BINGO! Winner, winner chicken dinner! You’re cooking with Crisco! Comprende?

 

It’s good to understand that when a page links to another page, it passes a portion of its PageRank on to the page it links to. Thus, PageRank is determined by the number – and more important – the quality of the links received.

 

And guess what? Not All links are created equal…true in theory but much more complicated. Higher PageRank pages contain much more power to give than lower PageRank pages. As a matter of fact, a link from one page can be easily worth more than one million times as the link from another page. BOOM.

 

Let’s return to using our imagination…you want to buy a book. You are on a webpage that shows links to that book at Bubba’s Book Store and Amazon. It’s safe to say – with almost 99% certainty – you’re going with Amazon, right? We recognize Amazon as a safe online store and the web has recognized this as well. Thus, Amazon is a far more powerful link profile (and higher PageRank) than any other site selling books… and thus it can pass more PageRank to the pages that link to it.

 

The equivalence is that is you are using authoritative links then your content is most likely authoritative and will be viewed – and used – more often.

In Part II of our summer series, we will review Relevance in terms of your page content.