Relevancy is derived from a web page’s trust, authority, and on-page SEO. For example, if you search for “merchant account” Google will return 6,550,000 relevant pages. But, in keeping with its primary goal of providing the most relevant information to search users it has to have a way to determine relevancy. The more relevant a page is the higher up in search engine response pages (known as SERPs) it will be placed. If Google has done its job correctly then the most relevant page will be placed first.
On-page factors play a key role in determining relevancy. But, in-order-to fight index spam, Google and most other search engines have implemented counter measures to fight spam. For example, it used to be relatively easy to rank number one for a particular key term or several key terms for that matter. All a website owner had to do was to place hundreds of repeating keywords or key phrases in their sites keyword Meta tag, this was known as keyword stuffing.
This is a factor that the webmaster had full control over and the search engines could do little about. So other factors were introduced to mitigate the impact of this strategy. As search engines become more sophisticated more and more counter measures are introduced to fight index spam. Usually, these counter measures focus on factors that are not in the control of the website owner. An example would be the number of inbound links that a website has and from how many websites these links are coming from. There are literally hundreds of factors that search engines employ to try and keep spam out of their index. Most of these factors, you, as a website owner, have little if any control over.
Relevancy is determined by several factors including:
1. On page SEO.
2. A web pages authority – how other web sites on the internet see it.
a. Number of inbound links.
b. Inbound link text.
c. Quality of inbound links.
d. Spread of inbound links across domains and IP addresses.
e. Domain name age.
f. Web page age.
3. Quality of the website.
a. Compliant html.
b. Compliant CSS.
c. Page load time.
d. No hidden objects.
4. Quality of the sites content.
a. Is it spammy content?
b. Is it unique content?
c. Is it quality content?
i. Wikipedia
5. Trust of the Website
a. Number of inbound links.
b. Inbound link text.
c. Quality of inbound links.
d. Spread of inbound links across domains and IP addresses.
e. Quality of outbound links.
f. Are there duplicate Title and Meta tags.
g. Does the site contain duplicate data?
h. Age of the website.
These are only a few of the factors that are taken into account by search engines to determine SERP relevancy. Most of these factors are controllable to a certain degree. The bottom line is that if you give the search engines what they want, good relevant content, they can feed to their users. And you don’t try to scam them. Then they will give you what you want, A steady flow of naturally derived organic targeted traffic.
One thing to keep in mind is that these factors do not all have to be present for a web page to rank for a keyword or phrase. A web page can rank in the SERPs for a keyword although its content is not specific to that keyword or phrase.
If the content of a web page is related to the search term and there are no “trusted” web pages directly targeting that keyword then search engines attempt to return the most relevant related web pages in their index. When search engines return these types of results they base their decision primarily on a site’s authority in the general topical niche that the term is related to.
However, the more competitive a niche is the more important it becomes to cross your Ts and dot your Is. The difference between a first and second place ranking can be as small of an issue as internal link structure or having better quality content. But, the difference in the amount of traffic seen between a site that ranks first and a site that ranks second can be huge. Remember, each rank below number one will receive at least 10 to 20% fewer visitors. So if the keyword phrase is “web merchant account,” which is searched for 246,000 times a month, then that can mean potentially loosing 48,000 chances to convert. That is a lot of potential clients lost.