Relevancy, the Most Important and Confusing SEO Factor

July 5, 2009 – 10:47 pm

The term relevancy plays important roles in each process of search engine promotion of a website. Whether you are finalizing the keywords, optimizing the website with keywords or doing link building for your website, if there is any confusion in relevancy, the promotional campaign can be mislead. Generally from relevancy we understand ‘related to’, however the specifications of relevancy varies in SEO depends upon the situation. Here I am discussing some relevancy factors that can have a great impact in a website’s success on web. From SEO perspective, there are lots of definitions for relevancy on web. Keywords, content or link partners that represent or can impact your website/services most would be best relevant to your website.

Keyword Research: As keyword research is a complete topic in itself to discuss and we’ll also discuss it in our future posts. However from relevancy point of view, a keyword that is focused to your website services/products will be best relevant. During keyword research, each keyword should be relevant and focused to website services and products rather than website industry. We can understand it better from following example -If you are searching for keywords for the website of a dentist, here targeted audience would be the people who are looking for dentists services. Then you should not take keywords like “dental equipment” however it is relevant to the industry still it is not be able point targeted audience.

Keyword Grouping for Website Optimization: You need be more detail oriented in this practice. After have finalized the keywords to be targeted on your website, you now need to group them to distribute on different pages of the website. If you are grouping the keywords in such a way so that all related keywords will be targeted on same page then the relevancy gain would be maximum.

Link Building: A link should be able to pass relevance and importance to the website on search engines as well as relevant referral traffic. There is no specific scale to measure the relevancy. However, we can have a fair amount of idea if it will be useful to place your link on particular website if

• The industry segment of that website is exactly same as yours

• People interested in product or services offered by that website might be interested in your products or services as well. For e.g., people interested in a trip to Hawaii might also be interested in scuba diving or parasailing.

• If your website provides supporting services or accessories for the product. For e.g. people buying an iPhone might also be interested in buying a case/cover for their iPhone.

The above mentioned points are not only valid from search engine perspective but from user perspective as well. If we ignore the user intent and consider only how search engines work, then opposite of last point mentioned above is equally true. In some cases where your website’s industry is not general then you might have problem to find relevant link partners for your website. Then you can search for broad industry relevant link partners to do link exchange.

So be careful next time, all it needs is a little thought process and business sense.