I get this question sometimes, and I think I can break it down into four simple areas. Three of them have to do with On-Page.
This is excluding engagement, but three from a technical stand point when you build your site, what do you need to do properly? I will go over them real quick. The URL is very important regarding how Google determines what you are relevant to. EMD stands for Exact Match Domain, so that is your root domain. Say your domain is My Domain dot com, this would be your root domain. It might have My Domain dot com slash page; that would be an individual page.
If this were your domain and someone typed in My Domain into the search engine, you would be very likely to show up, because the URL matters, especially your domain. This page, sub page, whatever, is also important, very important, to what Google determines the page and the domain is relevant to. That is why it goes beyond the root domain. Each of these sub pages matters, and if you have a sub domain, that sub domain name matters quite a bit as well. This is something that is real simple to get right, especially when you build your site right and you do your keyword research right.
The title of your page is very important, and the conclusion that you can make is that if it is a unique phrase, you need a unique page. If it is the same phrase or reworded like neurosurgeon and brain surgeon, that is the same thing in Google's eyes. You do not need two separate pages for it. But, if it is neurosurgeon accident and neurosurgeon jobs, those are very different concepts that need different pages, with unique titles.
The third piece of it, when you understand it, is not necessarily easy or small, but it is simple. Most people get this very, very wrong. How they point Google within their site to their other pages, Google crawls your site and takes note of exactly how you link and what you link to, and what links to you from each page. That is very important. Another word for linking might be site structure. If you were to put your site on a map, from someone who is crawling, which is exactly what Google does, it is going to have a robot go through and look at each page. Siloing is a way in which you do not need nearly as much off-page, maybe eighty to ninety percent less, and a lot of times with the siloing itself, you can get some rankings and traffic without even doing much off-page.
Essentially, what this does is you categorize your site, and you only link pages to each other that are most relevant to each other. If you want more details on that, feel free to contact me, and I can put that within the context of your business and your website.
Off-page, I am going to be real quick about. This is more complicated, and there is a lot more I can say about it, but one simple principle if you follow well is going to help you now and far into the future: high trust links only. You want to be as close as possible to what Google would consider a trusted seed set. This is a study done by a university a long time ago. Essentially, if the links coming back to your site are further and further away from this trusted seed set, the more likely you are to be spammed and the lower your trust is. If you were far away and had a high percentage chance of spam, Google is going to know that, and it is going to be difficult --if not impossible-- for you to rank well. On the other hand, if all your links are close to the trusted seed set you maximize a concept called trust flow, and it goes a long, long, way. You do not need as many links, especially when you combine it with really good on-page SEO and a few other things. That can take you a long way.
Again, if you want to know more details about this, feel free to contact me, and we can discuss how this fits within your website project.
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