If you have done any research on SEO in the past you may have been lead to believe that search engines identify your site and its topic based on what you place inside HTML tags such as Title and Descriptions, along with the content of the site. While there is truth to that, it is really only the tip of the iceberg. So how do search engines really determine what your site is about?

Image your website as a new business in a small shopping center or strip mall. You have placed a banner on top of the shop that says “Harold’s Paper Store”, letting the world know who you are. This would be equivalent of using that same text in your website’s Title tag. On your front door, you have a small sign that states “We sell all types of paper products, including …” This would be your site’s description.

Now imagine driving through the shopping center and seeing this large banner and walking up to the door and reading the sign. Well, you know that they have these types of paper products, but do they have the exact one you are looking for? This is how Google and other search engines think. Remember, the goal of any search engine is to be completely relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

Even though the search engines know you have certain paper products, they can’t be sure that you actually have what a searcher is looking for. You could, after all, still have a completely empty store. This is why search engines rely on what we call “social proof” to determine your site’s true content.

You see, ONSITE SEO techniques are only responsible for 15%-20% of your site’s relevance. OFFSITE factors are responsible for the other 85%-80%. If you think about it, this works much better for the search engines.  Regardless of what YOU say your site is about, the search engines get the input of the rest of the world as well to determine what the world thinks you are about. This makes is much more difficult for people just trying to get high rankings to “game” the system.

This isn’t to say that ONSITE factors aren’t as important.

If you labeled your store as a Shoe Shop you aren’t going to get a lot of people looking for paper to come in. Likewise, if someone performs a search for “100lb Gloss Book Paper” and you come up number one is the search results but your title says “Shoe Shop”, I doubt that searcher is going to look twice at your site.

So how does social proof work? Well, links to your site of course. But it is a little more complicated than that. There are different types of links that carry different value with the search engines.  Here is a list in ascending order (more value as you go down the list).

• Random Site Links from Unrelated Sites
• Links from “trusted” sites (.edu, .gov sites)
• Links from Sites with Related Content
• Links from General Authority Sites (Wikipedia, About.com, Etc.)
• Links from on topic Authority Sites (Sites that rank well for related topics)
• Links from MAJOR authority sites (MSN.com, Foxnews.com, etc.)

While links from Major authority sites aren’t typically possible, if CNN.com said your site was about [insert topic] then it is a fairly safe bet that you are about that topic.

At Moxie we take all of the above under consideration and as first step make sure your onsite SEO is in place and correctly configured. We then work on a custom link building plan just for your site incorporating all the link types found above and MORE!