Search Engine Optimization

This is the second part of the article on link building outsourcing. Here we are going to cover trial orders, creating and sending the project to link builders, reviewing quality of the work, and using several link builders in order to secure yourself.

Putting a Trial Order

The best way to test link builders is to put trial orders. The size of the order is up to how much you’re willing to spend. In most cases you will get good links, in a timely manner with the most courteous communication. That’s a very good sign. Trial orders can range from 10 – 20 links and up, depending on pricing. Obviously the higher end service you use, the less links you can afford as a trial.

Trials with Higher End Services

The best way to try expensive link building services is to target a phrase with very low search volume (or no search volume at all). Make sure the page you are targeting does not already rank for that “test” keyword, and preferably does not have it in the title, or any internal links. In the perfect scenario this page will have the keyword once or twice in the content; will not have it in the title or any of the H tags; will not have in internal links pointing to the page; will not rank on the first page. If you do not have a page like that, then you can always make on.

Go ahead and put a trial order request for a couple of links, and see how search rankings improve for that page once the job is done and Google finds the links. Your success indicator is positive movement few spots up in search results. This may take up to several weeks, so be patient.

The differences between high end and lower end link building services are:

• Quality
• Prices

Both go hand in hand to together. Sometimes it’s more effective to get a lot of cheap links to get rankings, while at other times it makes sense to invest more in quality.

Obvious. Once you have the list, contact each company indicating your interest, and ask for examples of their work. I’ve had some companies reject me, saying they do not show their clients links. It could mean only 3 things – they are out to scam you; they are out of work completely; they are very ethical. I don’t take the gamble and move on.

Review their work and select the companies which you think offer the best links. Keep in mind that prices are a big factor, so the quality of samples is DIRECTLY related to the type of company you are seeking, so don’t get picky if your budget isn’t big.

Various Payment Options

Once you find a company that you like, discuss payment first thing up front. Is it PayPal? Credit card or something else?

Run if they mention western union. I have nothing against the service and use it myself to send / receive money with people I trust, but it is a favorite payment method for scammers, so if any of link builders ever mentions WU – run like you’re about to get salt shot up you’re a$$ with a shotgun.

It is up to you to decide if you want to pay upfront, or after work has been completed. If there is trust, then paying up front shouldn’t be a problem. Since it’s a new company, consider paying upon completion of work. Many companies will agree, as long as the payments are steady and are sent of weekly basis.

For instance, if you have an order for 500 links with various anchors to different landing pages, then this creates a lot of work for any link builder. You aren’t likely to find a company that will agree to spend months doing the work and wondering if you will come through with the payment. Offer them a weekly payout, based on completion of the project. If for instance a company built 20 this week, then pay them for 20. If next week they do 15, pay them for 15, and so on. With this approach link builder does not take much risk, and you do not take any risk at all. Once the trust is there, the company will simply accept that it’s the way you work.  Once you have the trust, you can switch to up front payments.

This strategy will ensure that your budget is safe and secure.

Going to forums in search of link builders is another strategy.

• Post an open message on Forums stating that you require link builders. You will get good response.
• Participate in forums and narrow down users with the most knowledge. Then contact them offering work. A likely chance you will be rejected, in which case simply ask if they can refer you somebody.

Make a list of members that you would consider hiring. Find a list of SEO forums here.

Using Job Websites to Hire Link Builders

There are specialized job sited where you can hire workers remotely do almost any job for you. Simply search for “link building” or “search engine optimization”.

• Elance
• People Per Hour
• Guru.com
• Go Freelance
• Get a Freelancer
• oDesk
• iFreelance
• SoloGig
• ContractedWork
• Project4Hire
• FreelanceWork
• AgaveBlue
• FreelanceJobSearch
• FreelanceAuction
• Mac Freelancer
• WriterLance
• Hirelancer

A word of caution thought – companies and individuals that offer quality are usually booked, so someone who sits without work maybe is not as good or has little experience. On the other hand they might be having tough time, so don’t dismiss them based on that criteria alone.

Pricing models vary on each website. Job marketplaces also have a “star” system whereby employers review the work done by each individual and rate it. The ones with the best ratings cost more and obviously offer best service.

The process is pretty straight forward. Use keywords like “link building company”, “link builder” etc. Make a list of websites you possibly want engage.

There are link builders all over the world, and countries like India and Philippines offer very cheap labor. Aside from ethics, outsourcing to countries with cheap labor might be a competitive necessity. Though international corporations grab most the margins they make from cheap labor (Nike, Gap, etc) and starve their workforce, link building is a different space, where sometimes budget restrictions leave no choice.

Also keep in mind that MANY link building companies in the west charge premiums and send the actual work to the third world. There however companies that do not.

Use country specific search engines to look for link building companies. In Canada use Google.ca, for UK use Google.co.uk, for India use Google.co.in and so forth.

Look at the website back link profile as an indicator of their success. I think it’s a pretty good measurement. If a company claims to be good at link building, then its website must have lots of inbound links. Use SEO Toolbar from SEO book – it gives a high level view for websites in a split of a second. Check them link by link to give you an idea of what each company is capable of. Make a list of the ones you believe are the best, and do some searches using their names, to see if there’s any feedback from their customers. If do not find any, don’t worry, it’s not a bad indicator.

Outsourcing link building is a big part of search engine optimization industry. There are companies and individuals all over the world that do nothing but build links for clients. In this series of articles I am going to give useful, hands on tips on outsourcing and cover topics such as: looking for a link building company with search engines, on forums and job marketplace websites. I will also discuss payment options.

Looking for a Link Building Company

You’ve made your mind, it is time to outsource link building. It could be because of lack time, resources or knowledge in this area. You start looking…. Before we proceed, a warning – do not outsource the process completely. Link building drives search engine optimization and cannot be left at the mercy of others. Nobody cares if you succeed or not (leaving out people close to you). That’s a reality of life. There are FEW companies that do, or try to care, but there’s an added cost for it. If you do not know enough about link building, then start learning. There are thousands of articles and free resources on the web that cover everything from A to Z, so do your homework.

There are several way to look:

• Search engines
• Forums
• Job websites
• Mentions of companies on blogs and in articles.

The only one I want to mention here are the Text-Link-Ads. Google banned them from their search results, and probably has some tracking in place for advertisers that use them. This is just a guess, but I would not risk a site into which you put in time, effort and money.

I can’t say anything about black hat, since I don’t do it, but be wary here.

Buying Links – It is a Necessity  

Yep. Link buying is live, active part of the web economy. Ever since Google declared war on paid links, everyone stopped talking about it, but continued as usual. Of course there are exceptions, but links selling / buying is still active. Everybody from biggest brands to small websites does it, because it works. There’s a mutual understanding that link selling is revenue source for sites, and link buying is fuel for search engine advertisers.

There is however a chance that some really bad competition may rat you out, but if you are in a competitive space then there is no incentive for them to do so, because they are doing it as well, and you can rat them out just as easily.

Keep link buying as a quiet part of your link building strategy.

Using Your Marketing Tools to Build Up Links

If you have a good affiliate program – then it is a great tool to build links. Though affiliate links are easy to spot for Google, they still carry on value, because it shows the algorithm that your site is a source that provides revenue to other sites, therefore it must be important. In my mind it puts you one step higher in the pyramid, but that’s my theory.

Nevertheless, use affiliate program as a link building tool. It is easy to recruit sites if you have good incentive to sign up, such as good percentage of the sale and high conversion rate. It also works with the principles of the economy – I give to you and you give to me. You give an opportunity to make money, while in return you make money and get links. It’s a win for the affiliate and double win for you. Couldn’t be better.

Just monitor your affiliates well and clear out shady neighborhoods and scammers.

Good luck!!!

Again, I have to give an example of authoritative sites, and call you for some research.

Notice how best sites have a VARIETY of anchor text pointing to them. Anchor variations include site URL, targeted keywords, extremely long tail keywords, article titles, click here links and so on. The point is that apart from getting anchors with you main key phrases, add in several completely absurd and unrelated ones.

For example if you site targets “vacation pages”, then add one to the mix “find and explore cheapest travel on this website”, and add another one “here you can find great deals on travel to different countries”. You get the point.

Also direct those links to different pages, like the index, landing pages and some articles. This will make your portfolio look even more natural to the algorithms.

By the way I am only concerned with Google at this point, so are most SEOs. This maybe a mistake since Microsoft will soon hold around 25% of the market, which is some good traffic. How to SEO for Bing? I don’t know yet. Obviously basics apply, but there should be some variables that work better with Bing, which are yet to be a big concern for SEOs.

Going back to the authoritative sites, I want you to do another experiment. Use Yahoo Site Explorer or even Better Majestic SEO and analyze link portfolio of a really large website. You will find that the site will have:

• Links from within content (currently considered some of the most valuable links)
• Directory links like Yahoo, Business.com and probably some crappy ones as well.
• Blog comment links.
• Links on link exchange pages.
• No follow links.
• Footer links.
• Navigation links.
• Twitter links
• Social media aka Digg, Stumble Upon, etc
• Local citations aka Yelp, Yellow Pages
• Data providers such as phone companies, etc.
• Any other type of links you can think of

The point I am trying to show here – the best sites have the broadest link profile and that is the profile, in my opinion, is the best one to have to dominate your field. There is a lot of noise about low value of directories, no follow, and blog comment links, but mixed with more valuable links, they create the diversity which all leading websites have.

Analyze your links and ask yourself, am I lacking anything?… If you’ve been focusing on highest quality links up to this point, then spend a little time / money on lower tier links. Do some directory submissions, both general and local ones. Do some comments on blogs with spammy no follow link back to the site, even get some link exchanges. If on the other hand all your links are of lower quality, then really up the effort to get the best links there are, like content links and some home page links.

Together your portfolio will look natural and broad. Don’t get carried away with easy / cheap links here though.

Once you get top rankings the game isn’t over. It’s time to build walls, put up archers and prepare the mortars, because in case of an attack you need to protect yourself, and if you are in a competitive industry, the attack is coming.

Approximately 60% – 80% of all the clicks go to the first 3 listings (can’t find the source, but if you look around that’s the number you will see), with #1 being the sweetest. Everybody wants to be number one, and if your efforts paid off and you hold #1, then you must vigorously protect it. How do you protect it? By never stopping content addition, link building and conventional marketing / branding. Look at the top brands in the world. What do they have in common?…They never seize to advertise themselves. McDonalds always has commercials on TV. Duracell always releases campaigns that remind people they are “trusted everywhere”.  BMW always reminds us it is “the ultimate driving machine”. They advertise in order to protect their spots more than anything else, because if they do not, they leave themselves vulnerable for someone else to take the spot.

You must do the same with link building. You must constantly build links to your website in order to sustain and strengthen your top positions. Google is a dumb but a sophisticated math machine, that can processes amazing amount of trash managing to find extremely relevant results. It is VERY easy for Google to track new link additions to the websites, and cross compare them to recognized trusted sites. My guess is the rates do not have to be the same, however leading sites always continue to get new links, and you should too.

In this article I will discuss various link building strategies and techniques that will help you with your search engine optimization Campaign. Link building constitutes 50% – 70% of SEO, therefore there is no way of ignoring it, or leaving the task to somebody else.

Outsourcing Link Building

Outsourcing link building to companies that specialize specifically on link building is a good strategy to complement your overall link campaign, however it should never be outsourced 100%. If you are to outsource it completely, then you are leaving most of your SEO at the mercy of that company, which is poor judgment especially if you rely for most of the revenue on your website. The best strategy here is to use several link builders, combined with your own efforts. Never leave your eggs in one basket, and always diversify this task as much as possible.

Spreading Links Over The Entire Website

One of the signs of an authoritative website is the spread of links throughout many pages. Take the biggest and the best sites you can think of, and do some link analysis. You will find that they have links to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of their pages. The industry term here is deep links, or deep linking. The term is used to describe links that are going to parts of the site, other than the homepage. Deep linking is usually used to promote specifically created landing pages for some keywords. For instance, homepage may target the core term such as “Vacation Packages”, while landing pages may target secondary keywords such as “brazil vacation packages”, “paris vacation packages” and so on, which means that deep links with appropriate anchor text must go towards those pages. The strategy works well, however I want to make a point that in order to appear as natural as possible to the algorithm, spend a little time / money and place some deep links to parts of the site such as articles, which are not really targeted at anything big. This will ensure your link portfolio is as diversified as possible, like with all the authoritative websites.

I mentioned earlier that content management systems create bad URLs, which result in duplicate content. There is a way around this. It is called rewriting URLs. At the server layer of your website, you can restructure those complex URLs into clean, short and easy to understand URLs. Rewriting does not affect the commands URL passes to the content management system. It only changes the look that users and search engines get. Think of rewriting as putting a pretty mask on ugly, long URLs. Underneath the mask is the same address, that passes the same commands, yet everyone else sees the pretty side.

Rewriting is perfect for SEO purposes, since it eliminates duplicate content issue, and makes URLs look attractive and click able in search results.

The process of rewriting is often called mod_rewrite, since it was first used on Apache server. Now you can rewrite URLs on different servers, but the process is refereed to as rewrite.

Rewriting can get quite complex, as each command has to be assigned a “masked” value which the end user will see. There also has to be a command to create slashes, and ignore different filtering variables. For example if someone filters products by brand, URL should not change, or should only have added anchor #brand. This all has to be specified in the rewrite file, which will overwhelm you, unless you’re a coder. Having a code guru by your side helps a lot!

IMPORTNANT – if you rewrite your URLs, and search engines already have old one in the index, you can lose a lot of traffic! Make sure to 301 redirect all old URLs to the new address. Redirection will move spiders to the correct address, and will also pass link juice from the old pages to new ones. It is a very touchy issue to mess with something that already ranks and works, so if you have page ranking, don’t touch it. Only implement rewrites on new pages, and leave the old ones alone. Sure, it’s more work, harder to do, but would you rather loose traffic and money?

Good luck!

Your CMS must allow you to control each separate element on each page. It should also allow you to easily make site wide changes, category changes, and single page adjustments, for all elements of the page without exception. Why? Because sometimes you have to go in and change things by hand in order to improve search engine rankings. Sometimes you have to test for conversions, which requires many changes. The more flexibility content management system gives you, the better.

Here are the elements you need to control for SEO purposes:

• Title Tag –  appears in search results as a link. Here you want to put targeted keywords. It is also important to put in long tail keywords, such as product model name and number. People who search with exact model names and numbers are usually more serious shoppers than those using general queries. Thought the search volume is smaller, it is offset by higher conversions.  Make sure each product page has: Product number, product name, city (if local), etc.
• Meta description tags show up under the link in search results and are crucial to high click through rate. Meta descriptions sell your links. It tells why someone should click on it among all others. Combination of an enticing title along with a description tag can steal clicks and traffic from higher ranking, competitor pages.
• Meta keywords tag – Google has officially stated it does not support meta keyword tag. Yahoo stated the same, yet after running an experiment, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land proved Yahoo wrong, as it still seems to support the keywords tag. I am not sure about Bing, but it will become an issue as soon as the merger goes through.
• H1, H2, H3 tags – it is essential to have you keywords in those tags. Though it is possible to rank without them, purely on links, when dealing with CMS and pages that are not externally linked, H tags help a lot.
• Internal Link anchor text – anchor text is one of the biggest keyword ranking indicators, and if you link a page with “blue widget” anchor text, search engines will assume that’s what the page is about (this is a simplification). The more control you have over it, the higher results you can get for various keyword combinations. Keep in mind that according to Google around 30% of queries are brand new and have never been searched before. Vary your internal anchor text in order to capture a tree of rankings.
• Analytics – usually you need to install analytics on each page, so the CMS has to be configured in way, that it can automatically insert desired code to all the pages you want to track, which usually entire website. You can’t do it manually, so automation is the only way.

Two of the biggest problems with CMSs are:

• Duplicate content
• “One fits all” approach to creation of titles, and other page elements.

Let’s talk about duplicate content first. Search engines are all after user experience. Google measures user behavior to hundreds of a second (this is true, as one of the Google engineers said in an interview to business week -, me paraphrasing, – if we lose 1/10 of a second that’s a blink of an eye, and that’s a lot of time lost). Engineers push hard to return the most relevant results possible, as it is Google’s bread and butter. If it slips, it will lose share to a more relevant search engine, which means less clicks on ads.

As described earlier, CMS follow commands in the URL to assemble pages. Some systems also put in user IDs, which are designed to track each individual visitor. This can result in hundreds of duplications, since many different URLs point to the page with exactly the same content. For example, John and Jess get to the same page. CMS sees that they are 2 different users and assigns user tracking IDs.

http://example.com/cars/model.php?id=3&product_id=4&user1

http://example.com/cars/model.php?id=3&product_id=4&user2

URLs point to exactly the same page, yet search engines view them as different pages, because each URL is different! For large websites tracking IDs can bog the bots with duplications and result in filtering from search results. Though it is in the best interest of search engines to make sense of all the mess on non-optimized websites, it is in your interest to tackle the issue and make bots happy.

Another problem with content management systems is the “one fits all” approach to creation of pages. Most CMS pages will automatically slap a title tag on the page, not very different or exactly the same as the other pages! Title tag is perhaps the most important onpage SEO element, since it is featured as a link in search results! Imagine having thousands of duplicate title tags on the website that do not have targeted keywords! It’s a bad recipe. CMS must be configured to create unique title tags for each page, and have your unique targeted keywords. Apart from title tags, meta descriptions should be preferably different, along with varied anchor text from internal links in order to increase the range of captured keywords.

Content management systems have become an essential part of the web, keeping large websites manageable, easing lives of webmasters and online retailers. CMS’s get websites online and keep them functioning in order, handling content, images, video and audio files. To date most content management systems have not been created with search engines in mind. This results in multiple problems, which can keep a website from getting the sweet spot among 10 blue links. In this series of articles I will focus on CMS optimization issues and how to fix them.

How Content Management Systems Work

If you have 10,000 products to put up for sale, you wouldn’t want to create a separate page for each, and then dig through all 10,000 listings. It is a big waste of time. This is why content management systems exist. They make management of large websites easier.

CMS uses product descriptions, pictures and other elements to build web pages. It pulls those elements from the database and creates pages for each request. Pages do not actually exist physically like HTML, but are created each time someone requests for one (a visitor, or a search engine spider). CMS system knows what type of page it needs to assemble, by the commands it receives in URL. Those commands can create big problems from SEO standpoint (something we discuss in this article).

The commands look similar to this:

http://example.com/cars/model.php?id=3&product_id=4

The “id=” and “product_id=” are requests to the content management system. Once CSM gets those requests, it returns items from the database corresponding to each ID. It wraps up database content in a template (which you have specified) and the end result is a webpage.

continued.

You may find that some of your pages are missing from the search engine results. In order to find if the page is missing from the index:

• Take page URL and search for it
• Take a snippet of the text from the page, put it into quotation marks and search for it. (this is also a great way to check for duplicate content).
• Go to Google, type site:www.yourdomain.com and see which pages show up. You can do the same with Yahoo using Yahoo site explorer, but Yahoo days are numbered.

In my first web project I’ve worked hard to create high quality content, then put it all together as a website. My mistake was making too many directories, up to 5 levels deep, and not linking them well. The result was that Google did not crawl deep pages, so the pages never had a chance of ranking, even though pages were of very high quality. It still bogs in my mind, why wouldn’t Google crawl those pages? Though located deep within the site, they have links from different categories. Doesn’t it make sense for Google to crawl as many pages as possible, no matter how deep? I guess I shouldn’t complain because it creates work for SEOs.

Once you discover pages that have not been crawled and indexed you can:

• Submit pages to search engines
• Link to them from outside sites.

There are guidelines for being included in Google News, which are pretty tough from a small webmaster standpoint. It is impossible for a one man operation to get into Google News. It is also very hard for a small company.

How does Google rank news articles? The method is different than that of static web, since news is all about freshness. Neither me or you want to read a week old article, on a burning event. What does Google use? Here is some insight that might give us an idea.

Google’s ranking criteria makes sense, and doesn’t, depending on how you look at it. I personally do not trust any of the mainstream media sources on the topic of politics, since I believe media is there to pull a wall for the public and mislead population about what is really going on in the world politically and financially. I however have no problem trusting news with reporting of fires, and disasters. Considering this, my view of Google’s ranking criteria for many topics is false, as I do not trust CNN or FOX with news on Iraq, or Iran. On the other hand, I understand Google, and why it wants to consider those news sources as a valid, and bring them up in search results.

Here are some of factors that may affect article rankings:

• Number of articles published on average in a certain period of time
• Usage data
• Circulation
• Number of other associated bureaus with the site
• Number of topics which each publication covers
• Diversity of coverage
• Human opinions

Again, news is a very sensitive topic. I do not agree that big organization should be trusted more than small ones. I believe contrary. That is just my opinion, and Google is concerned with what works for the global audience, and unfortunately, big media is still trusted by many people around the world:

Here are some movies to consider:

• • Orwell Rolls In His Grave
  • Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism
  • CBC The Fifth Estate: Sticks and Stones
  • Big Brother, Big Business
  • The Corporation
  • Control Room: Propaganda of the Iraq War
  • Operation Hollywood
  • Breaking the Mirror: The Rupert Murdoch Effect

If you have a lot of pages to optimize on a website, it might be useful to create a spreadsheet with all the changes that include:

• Title
• Meta Description
• Meta keywords
• Text Headers
• Anchor text for links pointing to the page
• New Title
• New meta description
• New meta keywords
• New Text Headers
• New anchor text for incoming links

This level of detail will help you organize yourself and put all the onsite elements in one basket. With a quick glance you will be able to look at the entire onsite SEO strategy for a website, and record your notes if necessary. This sort of spreadsheet also makes perfect reporting tool for clients that wish to track your work, and see where their money is going.

It is necessary to keep track of the old, un optimized elements first, since with a quick glance you can judge what might be preventing a certain page from ranking for desired keywords. Also add in comment column in order to write your comments, and catalogue general topic of the page. It also wouldn’t hurt to put in number of internal links pointing to each page, which you can find using Xenu Link Sleuth.

Once you make the changes, use the same sheet to observe and record rankings for those pages. Depending on the campaign you may only be after several keywords, but if you want repeat clients, than over deliver and spend a little time ranking other pages, that were not in the contract. Client will only be happy to send you more checks, as you gain ordered keywords, and add extra rankings as a bonus.

Anchor text in links pointing to a page is used by the search engines to determine what the page is about, and determine what keywords the page should rank for on search results. There are however a number of issues that search engineers face with anchor text analysis. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask search gurus, must have all addressed those issues in their own way.

• If a page gets a site wide link, both internal and external, should the weight of all the links be treated as multiple, or should it be reduced? I can vouch that Google already discounts site wide links to a very large extent, even from very authoritative PR7 and up websites. Our competitor has gotten several site wide links (ranging a total of few thousand), for a 3 word phrase. The site wide links come from VERY authoritative, high PR domains, and theoretically PR and power from those links should give enough boost to beat us, yet this does not happen on Google. Bing on the other hand is a lot easier to play.
• What if a website is partnered with another website? How do search engines treat those links? Finding who is partnered is one part of the deal, but once there is enough information to be sure, how are partner links treated? Theoretically partners will help each other will links (those savvy of SEO). Do search engines look for SEO footprints before reducing impact of links from partners?
• If a page has 2 links to a website, with exactly the same anchor text, is that link treated as one, or two links?
• If it appears that a link was added to boost rankings of a page, how is it treated? What are the indicators that search engines use?

Is Google smart as we think it is? It is better to assume so. It makes you cover your butt more, and avoid foolish mistakes.

When a search engine collects links pointing to a page, and all of the anchor text in those links, it is possible to make an algorithmic judgment about what the theme and topic of that page is. What if there are not many links pointing to a page? How do search engines decide what the page is about (apart from easy to manipulate on page factors).

Lets take an example: www.site.com/tank-cannons.html. There are several links from www.site.com that point to www.site.com/tank-cannons.html with different anchor text. There are also several links from outside website that point to the page, with different anchor text. When search engines look at the external links, which might be “M1A1 cannon”, “T90 tank”, they may have learned a little about that page. They can also learn more by looking at internal links and the anchor text used there, which may be “tank cannons”, “cannon comparison”, “US vs Russia tanks” and so on. Each anchor text variation tells a little bit about the page, and helps search engines makes a judgment on when to show that page in search results.

Once search engines index a portion of the web, they can analyze relationships of different pages between each other, based on links. Page Rank is an example of this analysis, as PR looks at the links pointing from one page to another, and not the anchor text itself, which gets analyzed at different stages. Based on a graph search engines can get an idea of what the pages are about and use both internal and external anchor text as one more indicator.

Imagine that people search Google for the words like “muffler”, “transmission”, and “engine”, and then they click on the page in search results www.site.com/car-parts.html.

Now think of Google collecting all this information, in its database, and looking at it analytically and statistically. It might come to the conclusion that though the page www.site.com/car-parts.html is brought in different search spots for people searching for “muffler”, “transmission”, and “engine”, large percentage of those people tend to click on the results, without bouncing back to the search page.

Google may also track that people searching for very related terms do a similar action. Searchers querying “brakes”, “transmission”, and “engine” follow similar behavior, clicking on www.site.com/car-parts.html. Google may choose to adjust the ranking of this page for a number of keywords, since it sees resemblance in the behavior for different set of keywords.

Though link building and on-site SEO are an essential part of optimization, Google has amassed enough data to start using it for ranking purposes. This is precisely what is happening right now, as more and more behavior data is used to adjust already existing rankings.