Just like degusting a fine wine to appreciate its full-bodied flavor, don’t omit the chronology that it’s the process of the grapes aging combined with a semblance of subordinate processes that merge a plethora of complex layers into simplified notes to cultivate a delectable, yet exquisite fine wine. In parallel, SEO is quite similar.
Like a fine wine, authority occurs over time
While most blindly assume that SEO is about keywords (which is partially true), real SEO is involves grasping the underlying metrics and logic that search engines use to determine which websites are authoritative and which others are not.
The real goal of SEO is to create authority; and the faster you accomplish domain or page level authority for any website, the faster keyword conquests are realized and achieved. The extent of the authority of a website, determines how long (or short) a keyword conquest becomes.
If your website has exceeded the necessary tipping point (meaning it has enough term weight, link-flow from supporting anchor text and pages) and nests the proper on page signals, then that website is a candidate for occupying the top 1000 seed pages in Google’s index otherwise dubbed “the authority set“. In essence, the more weight the pages have, the more pages from that domain can be included as seeds in the organic search landscape.
While other pages are crawled, only the top 1000 matter and from those 1000 pages there are typically a handful of domains which are considered dominant within the scope of that topic.
Those websites are considered “the authority set” and once any page from any website has reached the apex of a topic and breaches the authority set, it now becomes the model that Google and other search engines compare other pages to (to ascertain relevance, validity and rankings).
Your objective is to (a) model your data (b) site architecture (c) internal linking structures (d) backlinks and (e) navigation schema to reinforce the topical scope of a page for (1) the primary phrase (2) parallel themes or categories (3) synonyms and sibling themes and (4) adjacent pages which could benefit from the link-flow or page level / theme /authority of that page.
This in turn allows you to funnel PageRank, trust and authority to any area of your website with the ideal anchor text (at will) which makes your website less dependent on off-site linking structures to achieve buoyant ranking factor.
For example, we have built websites using this technique and created PR5 sites from brand new domain (which achieved first page results in 30-45 days time for competitive keywords up to 7,500,000 competing pages using less than 50 backlinks off-site.
Similarly, the 70+ of the 95 internal pages also sprouted page rank (PR3,PR4 and PR5) which in turn funneled that ranking factor to other select pages creating an unparalleled tipping point like a tube Taurus folding in on itself) to propel even more rankings as a result, which leads to my next point.
Rankings can be observed from two perspectives (similar to the haves and have nots) and while the ultimate goal or optimizing your website stems from the desire to reach the top 3 spots (the traffic band) getting there is ultimately determined by how authoritative your page is and the website that supports it.
Allow me to elaborate.
Every page of your website (if optimal) represents an opportunity to rank that page and dozens more when combined with SEO best practices, such as:
- Relevant meta data (for every page).
- A mirrored keyword-rich URL structure for the primary market and semantic focus of the page.
- Proper H1 use to reflect the primary keyword
- Sufficient inclusion of theme relevant keywords for the primary and secondary keyword shingles (groups of words).
- Awareness of link-flow limitations (not having 100+links on a page via navigation and contextual areas to bleed ranking factor).
- Use of optimal internal linking
- Proper site architecture that reflects a natural data hierarchy (with more competitive keywords higher up in the hierarchy and less competitive categories and mid-tail and long-tail keyword variations supporting the theme).
- Proper grammar and conversion cues
- The proper proportion of themed inbound links from qualified sources to the home page and deep links to various supporting categories and landing pages (with their primary shingles and / or synonyms).
The takeaway here is, cultivation of authority is the goal of SEO. Once that authority has been realized, it must be leveraged to propel entire clusters of keywords into a prominent search engine position (with minimal backlinks) from using the overlapping nodes of relevance and page level trust and relevance score it has accumulated.
The extent of the authority depends on (a) the freshness and introduction of new / supporting content (b) the volume of content (c) the age of the domain (d) the relevancy or the internal link structure and most importantly (e) the time to authority factor (like a fine wine aging over time) that represents the priceless / more elusive ranking factor to distill in reverse or from the perspective of a competitor to emulate.
Great post Jeff.. I’m working on one of my sites now and your post has confirmed that I have a lot of work ahead of me. I created it before I knew enough about SEO.. I have like 60 static pages..
Now I’m going to be interlinking them.. UGH.. Wish I knew this earlier.
It’s good I didn’t do too many blog posts because now I can add posts and link them to my pages.. I’m about to re-create a monster of a real estate investing blog..
Thanks dude
Great info! I also find out that choosing the domain name incorporate with your keywords can also increase authority to a specific keyword. Thanks a lot for the info.
I think we put too much emphasis on keywords and link building. If anything Google recent algorithn changes have taught us, then it is that we should focus mainly on creating good content and take steps to promote the content effectively. As long as you follow the basic optimisation of your content, this should be enough for generating links and minimise the need for traditional SEO activities.