Authority, Relevance, and Trust-The ART of SEO

Art requires skill, and SEO is all about honing your skills to perfection. Each website is unique, catering to a different audience, providing a different product or service, requiring a different set of actions and initiatives. The art of SEO therefore has subjective interpretation and treatment.

In other words, knowledge, expertise, and experience can bring on the ‘A’ game in the SEO landscape where:

Knowledge – Studying about coding, design, server architecture

Expertise – Identifying page ranking trends, intuition about user behaviour

Experience – Repeated testing, research, and development with search engine algorithms

The A-R-T being authority, relevance, and trust are the three pillars of SEO that determine ranking. Mastering this skill better than others is indeed an art and that is why SEO experts are called so. Search engine algorithms assess these three pillars of good SEO and provide a framework for the SEO experts to unfurl their skill and creative imagination. How to earn this? That’s what we’ll discuss in this SEO guide to authority, trust and relevance

What's the difference between SEO Authority, Relevance & Trust?

The impeccable source credibility of any information provides authority.
The relatability of content to the proper market niche is relevance.
The constant upgrades and value provided builds trust

How does a search engine evaluate A-R-T?

There are three phases to the way search engines approach the managing and ranking of websites and pages. In the first phase, robots, spiders, or web crawlers as they are differently known, crawl through the web to find all the information posted.

The second phase is indexing the information collected by crawlers in the form of a web page copy stored in the data centre. In the third and final phase, the search engine spiders match the keywords to the information on their index to provide results. Algorithms rank the results in order of the relevance to the search term.

These complex algorithms used by modern search engines find, read, and ascertain the topicality of webpages. They use hundreds of factors to evaluate their authority and relevance. Google updates its search algorithms hundreds of times annually that affect the rankings and organic website traffic. Keeping on top these updates only improves SEO strategies but also safeguards against penalties.

Google has time and again proved its priority for user experience. In the same vein, an SEO campaign should not just focus on improving website ranks. Rather, it should be about making your website meet the demands of users. Therefore, building up on the three key principles of authority, relevance and trust are essential.

Authority in SEO: Do Domains, Pages and Links Matter?

A qualitative measure for strengthening the overall visibility and ranking of a website, adding authority is a core tactic in SEO strategies. How do you do that? Simple. Informative content and links as external citation authority. Now, both Page Authority, a metric that predicts how well a web page ranks on the search engine result page, and Domain Authority, where ranking factors are based on the popularity, size and age of the domain, add authority to a website.

Quality content always brings in link juice, and Google views linking as an endorsement. Thus, links pointing to pages are recognised as the best resources on the web for a given topic. With the advent of Google PageRank, a system for evaluating which pages are the most important based on scoring the links they receive, a higher PageRank pointed to a higher position in the search results. This, however, is in principle only.

How?

Well, the continuous evolution of Google’s algorithms has surpassed the basic PageRank theory to evaluate links by intuiting their authority in turn. This brings us to the next principle of SEO as an A-R-T.

What is Relevance in SEO?

When creating content, you should have in mind that your topic should be relevant to the search terms. Without this clear connection, relevance takes a hit and so does organic traffic. You can’t be talking about or linking to old cars if you are catering to the keyword ‘used bikes’.

Google takes into account the contextual relevance of a citation flow and provides higher rankings based upon quality of links as opposed to the quantity of backlinks. It wants the best and most relevant answers for its users, if your site cannot provide it, it’s a bad signal to customers as well as Google’s algorithm.

SEO needs to take a smarter look at relevance by achieving a correct and thorough understanding of the keyword-market connection. An optimisation based on an in-depth analysis of this will equal relevance thereby bringing in higher rankings.

Trust in SEO

Calculating the trustworthiness of a website does not happen overnight, as it is in real life so it is in the virtual world. It takes time to build trust and SEO Brand Authority in the online community and in the mind of Google. However, there are certain trustworthiness factors from the search engine’s point of view.