1/24/2006
What is "Relevant" anyway?
I am working on an article regarding "relevance" as discussed in terms of search engine optimization, specifically link building. Our President Anita and I are working on some research for the new version of our SEODoctor at Instant Position. Turns out so far that relevance is really a difficult idea to properly identify, when it comes to getting strong links from "related" sites.
In a nutshell, without going too far into the content of the forthcoming article, it seems that we as SEO's may sometimes cause people to focus too much on their specific niche in a far greater "relevancy pool." Early results indicate that high-performing sites for particularly competitive search terms (set at 5M+ exact returns) have a larger variety of inbound links than simply those specific to their particular sub industry. However, these powerful links can still be tied to the sub industry at least within a proverbial "six degrees of separation."
A good example would be for results of a search on a specific type of marketing. Instead of mostly links from other sites and directory categories related to that from of marketing, you should expect to find that the top results have strong links from more general marketing sites, as well as even other business operation-focused sites. I am not saying that it is no longer important to get as many specifically-related links as possible, but that this may be a good direction to start looking when well into the SEO/link building initiative process if you start “running out” of targeted links. As usual, high ranking competitors are the best place to start, and the use of tools available at Instant Position as well as webuildpages.com will help greatly in defining important links to seek.
I will post an update once the full article/case study is written.
In a nutshell, without going too far into the content of the forthcoming article, it seems that we as SEO's may sometimes cause people to focus too much on their specific niche in a far greater "relevancy pool." Early results indicate that high-performing sites for particularly competitive search terms (set at 5M+ exact returns) have a larger variety of inbound links than simply those specific to their particular sub industry. However, these powerful links can still be tied to the sub industry at least within a proverbial "six degrees of separation."
A good example would be for results of a search on a specific type of marketing. Instead of mostly links from other sites and directory categories related to that from of marketing, you should expect to find that the top results have strong links from more general marketing sites, as well as even other business operation-focused sites. I am not saying that it is no longer important to get as many specifically-related links as possible, but that this may be a good direction to start looking when well into the SEO/link building initiative process if you start “running out” of targeted links. As usual, high ranking competitors are the best place to start, and the use of tools available at Instant Position as well as webuildpages.com will help greatly in defining important links to seek.
I will post an update once the full article/case study is written.
