Ranking on Page One

Links that “Tell The Truth” about Your Content Win – every time!
by Leslie Rohde, StomperNet Faculty Member

The King and Queen of Ranking

You may have heard the expression, common in search engine optimization, that “content is king”. But do you know why? And did you also know that the king has a partner? The handmaiden of content, the Queen of ranking, is linking. Getting and keeping top ranked results depends not only on good content, but good linking as well.

In this article I’ll show why each is so important, how they work together and explain how you can use this royal pair to routinely create top ranked pages of your own.

What is Content?

When we talk about “content” we mean, simply, pages – the stuff displayed in your web browser. Anything that provides information, education, entertainment or a promotional message. Without pages – content – there would be no place for businesses to inform, persuade and sell; there would be no forum for individual expression and interaction; and there would be nothing for search engines to index. Pages of content are the real “value” the web provides and in the final analysis marketing on the web requires that you create value to attract and engage with human visitors. So content really is king.

But web pages by themselves are isolated and unconnected. Like a page torn from a book, content lacks context; it is unordered; it lacks reference and inter-relationship with other content; it is not navigable and not discoverable. Linking was invented to complete content.

Linking
Linking is what ties content together, providing context, sequence, comparison and contrast. The structure that linking provides enhances the meaning of content and it is only linking that makes “the web” actually a web!

Where content is King, linking is Queen. So which of the partners rules? Content or Linking? Which is more important? It’s a trick question. Neither one has any use without the other!

Picture if you will the web as a library: content replaces the pages of the books, but linking replaces isles, shelves, books, chapters, indexes and footnotes. So linking is vital, but only if you also have pages to link to! Linking has no reason to exist without content and content is completely unorganized without linking.

To complete our (virtual) library – search engines are the card catalog.

How They Work Together
Content and linking each have a role to play for humans and both are used for search as well. To build a successful web business you have to understand and accommodate how each affects the other, but that’s it. There are just these four things to get right.

Content for Humans
Humans need cues like headings, paragraph breaks, grammatically correct copy that is on topic and relevant to what they are actually trying to find. These are the sites we always want to find and the ones that the search engines would like to have rank well. They are easy to use, look professional and provide real value to visitors. The ultimate goal is to create a “sticky” site – not to confused with what you get when you feed a two year old – a sticky web site is a good thing: it is a site where people “stick around”.

Linking for Humans
Since only so much time can be spent on one page, it is the links between pages on such sites that allow humans to actually stick around by finding and consuming more and more content from the site. The more compelling the content and the more easily that content can be found, the longer humans will tend to stick. Being “sticky” really only requires two things:

Pages that humans like and
links between those pages so humans can easily find more of what they are looking for.
Now, here’s the thing about links. Humans really hate to be “tricked”. Linking is what guides and leads us through consuming content so the link text you use – that’s the blue underlined text we click on – needs to tell the human what information the link will lead to. Links need to “tell the truth” about what they lead to. Links that aren’t clear don’t get clicked at all and links that lie create the opposite of a sticky site: visitors that tell you to stick it!

Content for Search
Search engines try to view and rank content in the same way humans would because, well, that’s who the search results are for! It’s no secret that humans look at the page title and headlines within the page as indicators of what the page is about, and search engines do the same for that very reason. This is often called “keyword prominence” in SEO circles and we’ll shortly show how to use this in the design of top ranked pages.

In general, search engines try to use programs that make the same choices humans would reach by intuition. Intuition is well beyond what today’s computers are capable of, so search engines must do their best to “fake it” with math.

They are continuously getting better at such fakery and one of the reasons is that they use large groups of human reviewers to evaluate and critique search results and continuously adjust their programs to please these real humans.

The use of keyword prominence is one example of search algorithms being made to follow human intuition. The effect that links have on ranking is another.

Linking for Search
What humans expect of links is that the link text describes the content that the link points to. This is such a strong intuition for us that we feel defrauded when it’s not true. Likewise for broken links: humans dislike getting an error page when clicking a link and will typically blame the owner of the site where they found the link.

This intuitive notion of how humans use links is mirrored in what search engines do with them. Search engines treat the links pointing at a page as a primary authority for what the target page is about. So much so in fact that pages will routinely rank for searches where the search phrases appears nowhere on the page. The extreme case of this is so-called Google bombing, which is an undesirable result, but ultimately one that is not completely avoidable.

Putting it All Together
By understanding the dual needs of humans and search engines, allows us to develop a simple, step-by-step process for creating top ranked pages that are attractive to humans. Let’s walk through this procedure with an example page. You’re expecting about now a “blue widget” example, but I’ve never actually seen a widget, blue or otherwise, so suppose instead we create a page for a banker’s desk lamp.

Content
In creating this page, we’ll create our content in order of decreasing prominence, in much the same order that humans and search engines will judge our page.

We start with the title because that is the most prominent indicator of subject. To confirm for the human, and search engine, that our page is indeed about what we say it is, we have to use our precise search phrase – banker’s desk lamp – but we can add additional descriptive words around the phrase as desired. For example, banker’s desk lamp reviews, best banker’s desk lamp, and online banker’s desk lamp outlet are all perfectly acceptable.

Next up is our headline. Like the page title, we need to have our search phrase appear in its entirety, but here too we can include additional text and it is not absolutely necessary that our headline match our title so long as they are supportive of each other.

If the title and headline text are different, it will typically be more natural for the title to be conceptually more restrictive than the headline. For example, if we title our page banker’s desk lamp reviews a good headline choice might be best banker’s desk lamps since the notion of a review page might include a listing or discussion of what makes the best sort of lamp. The opposite arrangement of title and headline is not quite as good since a page about the best lamps is not necessarily a review page.

Having created our title and headline, we finally write the rest of the page to just answer the promise made by our title and heading.

Little if any SEO thought has to go into the majority of text on the page, as we have already confirmed via the two most prominent methods – title and headline – what our page is about. Assuming we really do write about what our title says we are writing about, the text can’t help but be supportive of our subject.

Figure 1 shows our finished page. That’s our content. Job half done. Now we need to make the page findable and confirm via linking the importance and the subject of the page.

Linking
Creating links to our page is nearly the same process as selecting our page title, but we have many more chances as we will have many many links, whereas we are limited to a single title for our page. This allows us to vary our link text so long as we stay true to our subject with each link. For example:

banker’s desk lamp reviews
popular banker’s desk lamps
banker’s desk lamps
the banker’s desk lamp
about the banker’s desk lamp
Not so good are less precise links such as desk lamp reviews or popular desk lamps because our page is only about one style of lamp. These more general links do tell the truth, but not the whole truth. Better to reserve these broader links for a more broadly focused page that covers the wide range of desk lamp styles the link implies.

So now that we have these wonderful links, where do we put them?

Linking Content Together
This is where we come full circle in the interaction of content and linking, because it is in and around content on our pages that we link to other pages of content. We create our own web of pages interconnected by links. Pages create both the reason to link and the place to put links.

Figure 2 shows our previous banker’s desk lamp page with links to our other pages added. Our tiffany and halogen desk lamp pages will similarly link to our banker’s lamp page. Here’s where content and linking are finally joined. Our content provides the place to put links and the links inform humans and engines of the presence and meaning of our content. The more content we build, the more need we have for linking and the more places we have to put links – pages are both the demand and the supply for linking!

The little piece of the web we’ve built here has the linking structure shown in Figure 3. This is how the entire web is built, how search engines find pages and how humans find the content they are looking for. By telling both humans and search engines in detail what our pages are about, via prominent text and links that tell the truth, we help search engines rank our pages for what our pages are actually about. All that remains is to let the search engines find us.

No Site is an Island
The little corner of the web we’ve built with our pages and our links is still isolated and cut off from the rest of the web. To allow search engines to find our new site, we need links from the rest of the web.
The way we go about getting these links are varied and worthy of an article of its own, but the links we want are always the same: we want links that tell the truth.

Busy Wins
More pages are better than fewer pages and more links are better than fewer links. On the web, bigger is simply better. Bigger websites, by having more pages and more places to put links, have a real advantage over smaller sites.

So keep the King and Queen busy! Always be looking for new content to add to your site; ways to link your pages together; and other sites where you can get links to pages of your own. Success is entirely getting the fundamentals right and repeating them until you win, so take what you’ve learned here, get busy and go win!

7 Step Action Plan for Top Ranking
Decide on the one search phrase you want your page to rank for. It is possible to rank the same page for several searches, but by focusing your efforts on a single search term, you increase the power of each of your links.
Title your page with a variation of the phrase you want it to rank for. Your page title will be displayed prominently in the search results, so add additional descriptive words that will make humans want to visit your page.
Create a headline on your page that confirms the promise of your title.
Write your page content primarily for humans, but do try to use your complete search phrase and the sepatate words in your phrase into the text. This will help both humans and saerch engines understand what your page is about.
Create links to your page using link text that contains variations of your pages and links within the text of your content.
Get external links to your pages that also use variations of your search phrases. This will help not only your rankings, but will also garner visitors from these other sites.
Rinse and Repeat. No site is ever “done” – only “better.” So continue creating content, linking it together and getting links from other sites.

Thanks guys
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