By Guest Author Bev Mapes, Top Of The List

Our previous articles in The Vision indicated the top factors that help websites achieve high placement in search engines as:

Factor #1 – keyword focused anchor text in inbound links
Factor #2 – external link popularity
Factor #3 – diversity of link sources
Factor #4 – keyword use anywhere in the title tag

The final factor in this series: Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from a Trusted Domain.

If a site from a “Trusted Domain” links to your website, you are one (1) link from a trusted domain (the closest distance you can be to a trusted domain without actually being the trusted domain). It is beneficial to be as close to a trusted domain as possible.

If a site from a “Trusted Domain” links to a website that then links to your website, you are two (2) links from a trusted domain (still very close). Search engines continuously count how many links your site is from a trusted domain, and that affects your PageRank and search engine placement.

What is a Trusted Domain?

Determining what a trusted domain is represents the more complex portion of this factor. It is also one that is not completely known. In our first article in this series, we mentioned that the search engines “give hints at how their algorithms work,” but they don’t give many. The SEO community has some pieces to the puzzle, but not all of them.

The search community “generally” agrees the following characteristics apply to a trusted domain:

• A trusted domain is determined by search engine algorithms and seems to be “hand-picked” or “hard coded”
• A trusted domain designation applies to the entire domain, not a specific page on a site
• Trusted domains are generally older, high traffic sites that represent overwhelming authority or high expertise on a topic
• While a trusted domain will have a high page rank, not all sites with high page rank are trusted domains

Examples of Trusted Domains

Some examples of sites that are thought to be trusted domains include:

• Technorati, Stumbleupon, Digg
• Wikipedia, DMOZ
• Certain .gov and .edu domains
• News sites, BBC
• Big Brands

What Trusted Domains are Not

Often the definition of a trusted domain can be confused with:

• A security certificate or “locked key” icon. This is NOT what the trusted domain factor refers to.
• A trusted relationship with another domain, which allows users on one website to share services of a different website. This is NOT what the trusted domain factor refers to.

While SEO experts know a lot about search algorithms and how to achieve top placement, the trusted domain area is more vague than others. Even so, trustworthiness of your domain based on link distance from a trusted domain is the fifth most important search engine optimization factor according to the community of SEO experts.

Top Of The List LLC is an SEO firm in Grand Rapids, Michigan working with Micro Visions, a leading managed services provider. Top Of The List offers organic SEO packages which focus on all five top optimization factors, helping our clients achieve optimal search engine placement and drive increased target market traffic to their websites.

In addition to your website development or IT project with Micro Visions, you can improve your website’s visibility with our services. Contact Top Of The List at 616-460-6778 today!

By Guest Author Bev Mapes, Top Of The List

Our previous articles posted on the Micro Visions, Inc. blog indicated the top factors that help websites achieve high placement in search engines as:

Factor #1 – keyword focused anchor text in inbound links
Factor #2 – external link popularity

Today’s article focuses on the #3 factor, diversity of link sources. This means that the websites which link to your website should be from unique root domains. Like so many other areas of the search engine optimization field, there are numerous details that surround that short summary of what “diversity of link sources” and uniqueness of root domains really means.

Here are some primary details about link diversity:

• Link diversity involving the domain name itself – Sites linking to your site should be from a variety of domains. For instance, a site with 100 inbound links all from different websites is far more optimized than a site with 100 inbound links that come from a single blog. Diversify the sites that link to you!
• Diversity of the root domain type – This refers to the type of domain, such as .com, .net, .org, .edu, etc. For International sites, achieving links from other countries is important.
• The IP number – Every website is assigned an IP number, which is used in a technical way to ensure users arrive at the correct website when typing its domain name into an Internet browser. Companies that maintain the servers – called website hosts – receive a block of IP numbers, which they use to share among all the websites hosted by them. What this means to your link campaign is that websites linking to your site should be from sites that use a different website host than the one you use, else their IP number may be from the same “block” of IP numbers and not be as beneficial. For those of you who are tech savvy, here’s a free tool that will check the IP number of any website.

Almost all inbound links to your site are beneficial, so we do not recommend turning down link opportunities just because they are from non-diverse domains. However, keeping in mind this third top factor, diversity of links, can make those inbound links influence your site’s search engine placement even more.

Top Of The List LLC is an SEO firm in Grand Rapids working with Micro Visions, a leading IT and managed services provider. Top Of The List offers organic search engine optimization packages which continually focus on all 5 top optimization factors. This helps our clients achieve optimal search engine placement on highly competitive terms, and drive target market traffic to their websites like never before.

Learn the fourth most important search engine optimization factor in next month’s newsletter, or contact Top Of The List at 616-460-6778 if you’d like to begin optimizing your website today!

By Guest Author Bev Mapes, Top Of The List

If you read yesterday’s article about organic search engine optimization, you’ll recall the number one factor that helps websites achieve high placement in search engines is keyword focused anchor text in inbound links. You may also see these links referred to as back-links. This article focuses on the number two factor, while each of our next three newsletters will address the remaining top factors.

According to 71% of the experts surveyed in a recent nationwide survey, the number two factor that influences search engine optimization is:

External link popularity. If you thought we could move on to something else besides those incoming links to your site, it’s time to re-think the issue. Not only is the anchor text of top importance in those links, but the quality and quantity of the inbound links to your site (called “link popularity”) is second in importance to the anchor text.

Quantity refers to “how many links” are coming into your site, so in general, the more the better. If quality and quantity were separated in this popularity factor, we personally feel quality is the clear winner. We’ve seen websites with less than 200 quality inbound links placing at the top of the list on extremely competitive queries, and farther down the list are websites with over 1,000,000 non-quality inbound links. While many factors are involved in placement, this is too large of a difference to ignore when it comes to quantity vs. quality. Some links simply do not carry as much “link juice” as other links do.

What makes a quality link? Search engine algorithms evaluate over 50 different factors about an incoming page link to determine quality, and thus how much “link juice” it will pass along to the website to which it links. Here are just a few of those factors:

• PageRank – In simple terms, PageRank is a “vote” from 0 to 10 which is assigned to every web page on the Internet. Pages linking to your site that have been assigned a higher PageRank, result in a higher quality link. This is sort of a snowball effect, since PageRank of any page is improved by all of the factors we are covering in this series of articles on SEO.
• Relevance – When the site linking to your site includes similar words and terms – meaning it is relevant that your two websites are linking – it increases the value of the link. For example, a tire dealer site that links to an automotive repair site would result in a more relevant link than if that tire dealer site linked to a day spa.
• The hierarchical page location of the inbound link on the external site – An easy way to measure this is in terms of “number of clicks” from the home page where the link resides. A link to your site from another site’s home page, or a page just one or two clicks away from the home page, is almost always more powerful than a link buried deeper into the site.

While almost all links to your site that come from external sources help your site, the popularity of the external website is the second of the top factors that can influence your site’s search engine placement on appropriate queries.

Top Of The List Search Engine Marketing, is a Grand Rapids based SEO firm working with Micro Visions Information Technology Consultants. We offer SEO packages and stand-alone link campaigns which continually focus on the number two optimization factor – obtaining popular external links. The results help clients achieve top organic search engine placement on highly competitive terms, and drive target market traffic to their websites like never before.

Be sure to check back next month to learn the third most important search engine optimization factor, or contact Top Of The List at 616-460-6778 today if you’d like to begin optimizing your website.

Read yesterday’s blog post for SEO Factor #1.

By Guest Author Bev Mapes, Top Of The List

Optimizing your website so users can find it by querying appropriate search engines takes time, work, and strategy. The search engines give hints at how their algorithms work for organic search, but the real value comes from experienced search engine optimization (SEO) experts. SEO experts have numerous clients, and thus have their finger on the pulse of what is working and what is not working when it comes to achieving top search engine placement.

A recent nationwide survey conducted by SEOmoz that was sent to SEO experts revealed the top five search engine factors in achieving high placement. This article focuses on the number one factor, while each of our next articles will address the other four factors.

According to 73 percent of the experts surveyed, the number one factor that influences search engine optimization is (drum roll please):

Keyword focused anchor text from external links. Keyword focused anchor text is what the words say that form the link(s) to your website. For example, if a restaurant called “Swordfish Grill” has another site linking to it, does the user click on:

a. Swordfish Grill
b. For the best seafood in town, click here, or
c. Try Swordfish Grill, the best seafood restaurant in town!

Obviously if you were a seafood restaurant business, example c would help your site the most in search engine placement for “best seafood restaurant.”

While almost all links to your site that come from external sources help your site, obtaining links that have keywords in the anchor text is one of the top factors that can influence your site’s search engine placement for those terms.

Top Of The List Search Engine Marketing, a Grand Rapids-based firm working with Micro Visions, Inc. Information Technology Services, offers SEO packages which focus heavily on this number one optimization factor. The results help clients achieve top organic search engine placement on highly competitive terms, and drive target market traffic to their websites like never before.

Read the next article for the second most important search engine optimization factor, or contact Top Of The List at 616-460-6778 if you can’t wait to get started optimizing your website.