Featured articles

Google does an analysis of every domain to determine “trust”-this has little to do with PageRank as even new sites can have a high trust rank.  Although a high PR is an indication of a domains trust, don’t assume that a site with low PR or no PR has little trust.

Let’s clarify with an example.  Assume you have a 13 year old daughter who needs to sell some Girl Scout cookies.  She has some delicious samoas and needs to unload them for cash.  There are only 3 houses on your street, yours and two others. One of the houses looks like the White House; sparkling and clean, manicured gardens, nice cars in the driveway,etc.  The other house looks like the Bates House from Psycho.  If you are like me you will only let your daughter approach that Bates house with Jack Bauer as her escort.  You simply don’t trust it.

-Side Bar-

Impressive imagery right?  In one paragraph I conjured up an image of a 13 year old girl scout, Jack Bauer, and Norman Bates.  Not to mention Samoas (the best GS cookie).

-Side Bar Over-

Google is much like the father in that example.  They have to judge every site.  Give it a quick once over to determine where it should rank.  A site with a high trust can easily rank for long-tail and for the main terms in the market with a low quantity of incoming links compared to its competitors.  So, to benefit from this you need to know what factors are involved:

— Age of Domain

— Content Originality

— Link Sources (Trust Rank of The Domains Linking To You Determines Your Trust As Well)

—- .org

—- .edu

—- Wikipedia

—- Top Sites In Your Market

—- Top 500 Sites

— Relevance of Links Based on Content & Location

If, when Google is first analyzing your site, you build out high quality links slowly with these factors in mind you can quickly rank a site that otherwise would take months to get a strong foot-hold.

Often we simply need a fresh perspective to really see the full picture.  Local SEO is no exception.  To rank top 5 (which is always my goal) we need to see how strong the competition is in our market.  Because, if we have the choice of two keywords of equal value it is always wise to get the easiest one done first.  So, here is a 1 minute test to see how strong your competition is.

(You can click on images to make them larger)

If you look at this image, you will see #1 has 1 page in the top 10. But that doesn’t tell you how ‘strong’ this site is dominating the top 10.  However, we can change all that with just a few clicks of our mouse.

If you go to the top right and choose “Search Settings” you can choose a

whole lot of options-but all we want to do is change the default so that instead of 10 listings on a page lets have Google show us 100.

It only takes a few seconds but now we get different results.  And we are able to see that not only does this guy have #1 but he also has #2.  The way this works is that any page that would also be in the top 50 or top 100 (depending on your setting earlier) goes right under their top listing.  So with 2 clicks of our mouse we see that this site is a major contender…with 2 pages in the top 100 they are pretty strong.

Doing Local SEO is all about information. The more you know the more you can benefit your own sites or your clients as quickly as possible.  And this shows us that this site is one to watch.  Track what they are doing and make sure you are doing it as well.  But, we will get into that more in a future article.