Every day, people send out thousands of conscious and subconscious signals, whether they are indicating a right turn, raising their hands, or crossing their arms. Signals can be interpreted positively or negatively, or they can be completely misinterpreted with unfortunate results. Website designers most often want to send the correct signals to search engines, but often end up creating a mixed or incomplete message. Sending the wrong signal to Google or Bing (which now supplies results to Yahoo) can have consequences that take time and cost money fix. There are over 200 separate and distinct factors for ranking on Google, and certainly a similar number on Bing/Yahoo, so the right message about your site is imperative for search engine success.
Some signals for SEO are hard to fake. For instance, the age of your website and its history (in the eyes of a search engine) are factors that improve the trust experience. You can sometimes buy older websites, but it makes sense to check with archive.org to be sure that the domain associated with the site has been serving up content for a couple of years. You might also want to see if the site had any seedy content on it previously. Search engines purportedly keep records of whether a domain name had been “banned” in the past for abuse, and you don’t want to push the SEO envelope on a website that already has a few strikes against it.
Naturally, the links to a site are huge signals for Bing and Google, and the quality and age of those links plays into the algorithm. Older and more trusted links go a long way, but if your site has a poor link profile then you might want to start building one now. As a caution, you could be sending negative link signals to the search engines if your anchor text is all identical, you get a whole batch of low-quality links at the same time, or you suddenly have a dozen links from sites with high pagerank without an expected ratio of low and average PR links. Many paid links are easy for search engines to spot, so sometimes the best way to send a natural-looking “signal” is to work with experience link builders who can feather in links in a way that looks more reasonable. Additionally, an SEO consultant can also advise you how to get genuinely natural links, which obviously require a lot more time and energy.
Perhaps the clearest and most basic signal for any site involves site organization and readability. If a search engine can’t read your site, it might as well not be online. If a search engine can’t categorize and classify your content, then it is not going to have a reasonable chance of getting the best possible positions. Search engines are looking to see a pyramid-like hierarchy of pages, so whether your site has 5 pages or a hundred thousand, you want to make sure the engine can understand the relative value of each page on the site. Recently the Google Mayday Update downgraded millions of web pages because they were not adequately showing trust signals and a clear relationship to other categories on the site. Sometimes this was because the pages lacked a clear directory structure, and in other cases the link popularity of the homepage was prevented from trickling down to the pages deep in the site.
Even though human usability is not directly listed in the signals here, search engines are always working to emulate a real user’s experience in order to deliver up the salient facts about a site. If a person can click through a site and find the correct information quickly, a search engine can usually do the same thing. In fact, a lot of search engine improvements have been made which deal with code issues that prevent spiderability, but this does not excuse the webmaster from making the site easy for people and engines at the same time. In many cases, SEO initiatives coincide with improved usability, and some of the recommendations made by Web.com Search Agency and other SEO consultants simultaneously result in better conversions from existing traffic. As search engines use more artificial intelligence, human behavior emulation, and actual data from users (like Google Toolbar data, for example) they will be able to understand which sites people actually like to use when they make certain search queries. By building such a site now, you can send a clear signal that you are positioned to make the search engine’s job easier while you improve your chances for online business success.
