How Search Engines View Your WebsiteHow Search Engines View Your Website

Last time we started covering the topic of understanding links and search engines. This info is good for you to know, and please rest assured that you don’t have to be a tech head or SEO junkie for this to make sense.

We’re just covering the basics, and this information will help you understand what is happening when you do article marketing.

As a brief lesson in SEO (search engine optimization), to determine what your site is about, along with the individual pages it contains, search engines use four main indicators:

1 – The text on your site.

For example, the text of your titles, your headings , the other readable text on your page, the image names, the alternative bits of text for your images, and so on. Incidentally, this also includes your domain name, and it’s very important to have a domain name that reflects the main keyword that you want to rank well for–at the very least your domain name should be semantically related to the main keyword that you want to rank highly for.

2 – The internal links on your site.

So, if Page A on your site links to Page B with the text ‘German Shepherd Dogs’, it tells the search engines that Page B is about ‘German Shepherd Dogs’.

Similarly, if you have a link with the text ‘Home’ pointing to your home page (as many people do!), it doesn’t tell the search engines anything about what your site is about. You want to take every opportunity with the links on your site to be descriptive of what the page you are linking to is about. If this is you, then it’s a great idea to change the text of those links so that they help search engines understand what your site is about!

3. The links from your site to other sites.

Linking to other sites related to your niche actually boosts your SEO, as it helps solidify your site as about something specific. The relevant outbound links also increase the value you offer visitors. By the same token, if you link to irrelevant sites, it distracts from your main focus and can negatively impact your ranking.

4. And now this is the important part: links from other sites to your site–we call these ‘backlinks’.

The opinion of other sites as to what your site is about, indicated by the text used in the link, is vitally important in the SEO game. The backlinks that your website receives from other websites have extra special authority for the search engines, because backlinks are less under the direct control of the site owner (you), and so less subject to artificial manipulation.

Now, the 4 factors listed above are just the main indicators–there are other elements that come into play, such as the age of your site, the amount of interaction (eg. blog comments), and the ’stickiness’ of your site (if someone finds your site via Google and quickly clicks back to the search results, it tells Google how relevant your website is to the terms that were  being searched for.)

But for our purposes, we’re sticking to the 4 main indicators above.