Steve Breault, Co-Founder, S.E.M. Masters

Everyone with a business wants to rank at the top of the search engines.  It gives your business instant credibility and traffic because people automatically click on the sites shown at the top. Since this top ranking is so valuable, many businesses employ Niceville SEO services experts to carry out processes to get them that top ranking. The problem is that Google hates SEO.

They are very concerned about the user experience that people have when they use their search engine.  They want to show people the most relevant sites based on the words they are searching for.  They don’t want to show them the sites that hired the best SEO company. That desire means that they change the criteria they use for ranking sites a lot.  They are constantly looking for new ways to make sure the best sites are ranking the highest. However, there is one thing that never changes, because it is the most important element from Google’s perspective – relevance.

If you want your site to be at the top of the rankings, you have to convince Google that your page contains the most relevant content for the user.  Of course, you will also need additional SEO work to reach that top ranking, but if you have relevance in addition to SEO work, you can be much more comfortable when you reach a high ranking.  If you don’t have relevance to go along with your SEO work, your ranking could plummet with the next Google update.

You have to convince Google that your page has the information that people actually want.  That means it has to actually apply to the keyword.  If the keyword you are trying to rank for is “leather dog collars” but the bulk of page is about “dog leashes”, it will be much more difficult to rank highly. There are many factors that Google looks at when it considers relevance.  Those elements are very easy to meet when the page is actually about the keyword.  (i.e. leather dog collars)

Google is looking for your keyword in the title, meta tags, headings and subheadings, etc.  If the page is actually relevant to the keyword, this will naturally occur. Google also looks for the number of times your keyword appears and how often it appears.  A page that has the keyword listed five times, but only in the first paragraph won’t rank as well as a page that contains the keyword once in every paragraph.  If the keyword is spread out over the entire page, Google will consider it to be much more relevant to the keyword.

Another factor to consider is that the people who click over to your site need to see relevance too.  If they are looking for information on the keyword and can instantly see that your page isn’t relevant, they will click away within a few seconds. The best way to ensure a consistent, long-term ranking in Google is to develop a page that is relevant to the keyword and then add SEO work.  If you’re looking for someone who can provide you with Niceville SEO services, make sure they have a complete understanding of this concept.