Beginner’s Guide to SEO Part 2

Expert Insight from Louisville Web Designers

In the first part of our beginner’s guide to SEO, we introduced you to keywords and tags. These provide the basic information about your site to search engines, and are the foundation of your SEO campaign. Now that the crawlers can read your site how can you show up higher on search? There are a few ways to do this, using keywords for example, but to show up consistently you need to build authority.

But what is authority? Authority is built when other websites link to you using keywords that are also common on your page. A page that is an authority is one that has a lot of links that are related to the topics they are considered an authority in, and these links come from other sites that also have authority on the topic. As you gain authority, search engines send spiders to your site more often, making it more searchable and better indexed. To truly build authority, the first think you will need to do is have a specific topic you want to be an authority in, then go out to other sites within that space and try and get them to link to you. These links that you build are called backlinks, and they are the key to your search engine success. A backlink is a natural, or unpaid, link to your site from another site. Google claims that its algorithm can detect a paid link, and therefore prevent sites from building authority unnaturally; however among the SEO world paying for links is something that happens every day. Also, as I mentioned if your backlinks come from other sites with a lot of authority, this will carry more weight than ones from sites with lower authority.

While making sure you have good keywords and use them effectively is essential to getting found on a search engine, in order to become a top result you need to build authority on the Internet. It is a lot like a popularity contest, but when thought about rationally, this method makes a lot of sense. Shouldn’t a link from a site like the New York Times or an .edu be more important than one from your sisters facebook page? So if you want to be an authority on a topic and show up on the first page of Google, it’s time to start link building.