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It’s been said that Google takes over 100 different considerations into account when figuring out where to return your page in a search result. Even though that sounds like a lot, all those 100+ factors can be boiled down into two core concepts. To rank well, you need to maximize both.

Ranking = Strength + Relevance

Page Strength

I know a lot of SEO’s love to say PageRank is dead. I disagree, and see evidence of it every day. Sure, PageRank is certainly not as important as it used to be, but it’s certainly not dead.

PageRank is a measure of how important a page is on the Internet as a whole. Every page that links to your is essentially counted as a vote of confidence for the page. Links from important pages like the New York Times count more than links from lesser pages like your brother’s personal blog about his dog. To over-simplify things greatly, Google’s PageRank score is a sum of the value of all those votes in comparison to all the other pages on the web.

There are other factors adding to a page’s strength as well. Such as:

• Is the page new?
• Has the page and/or domain been around for many years?
• Is the domain registered for a long term between renewals, like 5 years?
• Is the domain or page penalized for not following the webmaster guidelines?
• Is the domain selling links?
• Is the page located in Wikipedia? (OK - maybe not that one)

I know I’m missing some factors, but you get the general idea about what might play into strength.

What’s clear though, is that your page is never going to rank well on strength alone.

Ranking well needs one additional key factor…relevance.

Query Relevance

If strength was all that was required, a site like www.google.com would rank #1 for all queries…it’s a PageRank ten out of ten. That obviously would not make sense.

Relevance is a measure of how related a page is to what the user has search for. Your brother Joe’s blog about his dog, even though not a strong site, may very well be the most relevant destination for people searching for “joe dog blog”.

Relevance factors include:

On-Page:

• Query Terms in the title?
• Query Terms in header tags?
• Query Terms in body text?
• Query Terms in outgoing link text?

Off-Page:

• Query Terms in incoming link text?
• Query Terms in “on page factors” of the pages linking in?

It’s possible for a page to rank well based on a strong relevance while having a low pagerank, which is why some people say pagerank is dead. (That doesn’t mean PageRank is dead, it just means there are other factors than can overcome a low pagerank.)

Burn the Candle on Both Ends

Strength and Relevancy are simple high level concepts that can be easily explained and understood by both technical and non-technical users alike.

Some tasks, like link building, will have an impact on both.

For a strong ranking, your strategy should be to maximize both strength and relevancy. Don’t give one the blind eye.