Is It Diversity Of Keywords In Link Profile That’s King?
No this isn’t an article about backlinks beating content because we know the right backlinks keep nearly blank pages high in Google – for months at a time. It’s just a theory so feel free to discuss with me in the comments. Bit of a ramble. I’m thinking about this and looking for exceptions, or evidence against, and to start an honest discussion. i’m fed up pumping info out, I’d prefer to start a discussion on this one.
It’s about ranking in Google or not ranking. Based on observations.
Links effect rankings, more, they even PERMIT rankings. If you haven’t got the keywords in links you won’t feature and you certainly won’t rank.
Content is king, especially for humans, but that content can’t rank without links. I often wonder if Google needs the keyword you are wanting to rank for in the site’s link profile. If it’s not in this link profile for your site, you wont rank.
You get the keywords in your link profile by
- getting links from other websites (primary)
- internal navigation links (secondary)
I’m wondering if Google treats a page title as a tertiary link if the first two signals aren’t clear enough and especially if the content is well cited (but with poor anchor text)?)
The relationship between content and links is incestous and can’t be seperated. I think seo zones. To rank it needs to be in your link profile and in your content, more specifically in:
- Links
- Title
- Content
In that order. Google is making it harder to rank without having the keyword in these zones. Even though the title is 2nd in my list, you can quickly see how pivotal your page title is. I mean can you even rank what’s more important out of the 3?
Adding a made up keyword to a page invites the supplementals to kick in with different rules – letting content rank without links (I think).
In normal serps you can have the word on the page but because it is not in the link profile it won’t rank. Though in a page title, it may rank, throw in an internal link or backlink, it will rank. I’m talking keywords here not phrases.
Perhaps authority sites rank because of their link profile, not the content (although, of course, they wouldn’t have that link profile without that content!) – But I am talking about the actual wheels that are play here.
I don’t think I need LOTS more content on one page, I think I need LOTS more titles and words in my link profile – the content just backs this up ( a strange thought if you think about it). So in effect for new pages you can get away with less content (more may increase long tail searches).
So it’s not content I am adding, I am adding important keywords (and diversity of these) to my link profile. More links less content – and I’m still not linkbuilding yet. You can do a lot of this via internal links on a strong domain.
So for ranking, the most important is:
- Diversity of keywords in your entire link profile
- Diversity of keywords in your page title
- Content (enough to make a page relevant to the keywords it can rank for)
If you think this way you can get pages that don’t rank to rank, quite easily. and you don’t need to buy 100 crappy links from domainers (although that can work too lol).
But yes you can get to the end of this article and say so links beat content, and yes, they can, but you’ve missed the point of what I am on about or my writing has confused – sorry.
Mmmm…. I don’t think I needed this much content!
Note perhaps I am not thinking about this the right way. If someone can help, let me know and yes of course I know there are other things at play too.
PSST – Did you see our new SEO Reference Guide For Beginners? I certainly didn’t need that much content, but hey I went for it 
Written by Shaun Anderson
Great article. Very interesting information. I use to read about 15 blogs a day, but because my time is nowlimited, I only can read 1 or 2 now. And this is one of them.
You’re right on the ball with this. One thing I should mention is that I’ve noticed a clear trend that google is giving less weight to internal links and more weight on relevant, trusted external links.
As for the originality of the content here’s what I would say Google values in order of importance.
1) Unique Content (keywords)
2) Links
3) Title
4) Unoriginal Content (keywords)
For uncompetitive keywords 3) isn’t essential and you can still rank well without keywords in the page title.
For uncompetitive keywords you don’t need 2) to rank well but having links will get you to very high positions quickly.
For competitive keywrods 1) doesn’t usually exist so you must have a strong combination of 2), 3) and 4) to rank well – i.e. all elements must work in unison and if content and title is ok then links are the only modifier that determines how high you will rank.
Also, a lot of emphasis has been placed again on the domain URL again so my complete list for medium to high competitive keywords would be
1) Links
2) Domain URL
3) Title
4) Content
Where all 4 must contain the keywords but link building will be what pushes your site up in the rankings. Again I stress medium to high competitiveness.
Of course, that unique content is important. But without links and something magical between your link profile and your content that content wont rank – would you agree? Also, I’d consider the algorithms Google use to determine relevancy. What are they keying off? I think Page Titles page to page is a very important part of the mix here (as well as anchor text obviously).
Interesting you place so much weight in the URL – I take it you mean if it’s an exact match domain.
Thanks for the great comment
Your point about diversity of keywords in anchor text is something that most SEOs specially the DIY SEO webmasters miss completely. If they want to rank for a keyword, they will create a LOT of links using that as anchor text, though they should create backlinks with different variants of the keyword and phrases to get good long tail results. It also makes the backlink profile look natural.
It’s not just the anchor text though, surrounding text ‘definitely’ helps in ranking because I have seen sites ranking for ‘submitter name’ that was used to submit articles or links to classifieds or directories, though submitter name was never used as an anchor text by these sites.
Surrounding text definately counts “sometimes”. I’ve tested it. I might show an example but it doesn’t seem to work every time.
I’ve read that misspelling some of the more popular keywords you are trying to rank for when link building can be beneficial, but I’m not sure how much emphasis to give it. As a former eBay seller, I know it worked pretty well for competitive searches – the volume was lower but your chance of showing up in the top page of search results was about 90%.
What are your thoughts on this – do you think using misspelled words as a good way of helping rank in long-tail searches, or a waste of time?
Howdy Stefan – If the term is commonly mispelled sure I would go for it. I’d link to the site with a couple of mispelled links in the anchor text so the spelling mistakes are on another site, not yours, you look professional and you still rank. Unlike this – (which does pull in some traffic though) – http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-misspellings/
I look at the current mispellings I do get already and optimise those first.
Exact match domains where the domain is made up of the keywords rank extremely well right now.
For example say you take two domains
kew-words.com
luhts.com
Both try to rank for the keywords “key words”
With equal effort domain key-words.com will outrank the other guaranteed.
A simpe way of looking at it. in the real world of course there are other facotrs at play, but I agree exact match domains work a treat when optimised and promoted correctly. (and don’t even mention Yahoo – what a joke!). I’m number 2 in a niche I am competing with an exact match and one link.