How Relevance Affects Search Engine Rankings

In SEO, it's important to learn the importance of relevance. It's the criteria that they use to determine the importance of a target keyword, web page or an entire website within a niche. Adding content that is naturally related to the main theme of the site will help you boost in rankings.
There are different levels or categories on how search engines measure the relevance of a specific website. First is Content Relevance. Whenever there is a search query, search engines measures the correlation of your content to it. The main factor that affects this are your keywords, specifically their density and placement. It's important to know that they also consider synonyms or related phrases but the content that appears as an exact match to the term being searched appears more relevant than them. Since search engines can recognize synonyms or related phrases as relevant items, stuffing them too much can result to spamming. Same goes with an irrelevant keyword, it's deemed as an attempt to boost your site rankings artificially. This is where good on page optimization takes place.
One more factor that affects Content Relevance is the Keyword Density. This is the quantity of your keywords in the web page. The safest number of keywords in your content should be ranging from 2% to 8% of the whole content. Although it is given lesser importance nowadays, it will not hurt to know how to compute keyword density.
Having an image in your website makes it more attractive. It also plays a big part in your web page performance. Images without relevance to the topic will easily put off your visitors. So don't just put images to fill up spaces in your page. It's a different thing when it comes to search engines. Since it cannot view the content of the image, it reads them through the use of image alt tags. Relevance is also applied in this tag. Just add keywords or any word that would correlate to your business.
Another way of measuring relevance is Link Relevance. It's just like how an off page optimization work. If an inbound link from another page is based on the same niche as your own page, then it is considered relevant and will be given greater weight than those from unrelated page. The anchor text used should also be relevant. The authority of the website you are linking to is also given importance in a given search query. Sometimes it could be authority for a given topic or category and it could also be authority of a website within a niche.
Relevance, through search engines, gives authority to your website. In short makes you an expert in your field. As an SEO, you not just plainly optimize your website but also evaluate the relevance of every content that you do. It also helps to ensure that visitors are targeted and more active when they do navigate to your pages.
Gian Lardizabal is an SEO Content Specialist at iVentures. We at iVentures provide Search Engine Optimization and other outsourcing services. Please visit our iVentures website for inquiries.

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