Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

No, I haven’t gone mad.

If you want more traffic, increase your Trulevance.

I bet you want to know what Trulevance is now, right?

OK, I’ll spill the beans…

Trulevance is a contraction of Trust and Relevance.

Let’s break that down a bit…

Your pages need to be Trusted before they’ll get traffic. The best example of trust is Pagerank. But Pagerank can be manipulated. See the last blog post where Dr Andy agreed with me that links from article directories are now less valuable. Buying and selling PageRank is frowned upon by Google. So how can Google fight back and make sure that Pagerank maintains its integrity? Simple. It downgrades the value of links from low-PR pages, and boosts the value from high PR pages. If you’re outside the “highPR clique”, tough luck… your pages aren’t trusted. If you’re inside the “HighPR clique” congratulations… you can expect a ton of traffic. (ever typed anything into Google and NOT seen a Wikipedia.com page in the results? I thought not).

How else can Google determine trust? Well, what about the age of a domain name? If the site has been around for a decade and not changed ownership or overall content, you can imagine Google would trust it more than a fly-by-night site which pops up, gets a few links and disappears. A lot of people call this the Google Sandbox, where they don’t trust new sites that don’t have good backlinks but I expect it’s more like a fine wine getting better with age. First you have to escape the sandbox, but then your site may get awarded positive points for the length of time online with the same content and overall theme. The longer your site has been online, the better. I have sites from 1997, 1998 and 1999. I know a thing or two about old domains.

Have you noticed how difficult trust is to achieve? You can’t fake the age of your domain… and if you buy an old domain, Google will know about the change at the registrar (because Google IS a registrar)… and even if they don’t pay attention to that, they will notice if you upload your content and the site changes. You also can’t easily get very high PageRank links. This is exactly what Google wants.

The second part of “Trulevance” comes from Relevance. Put simply, this is a combined measure of your off-page reputation, your on-page content and how they match up. If sites around the Internet point to your page as a place for “cookies”, but your page doesn’t mention “cookies” anywhere, you’re going to find it harder to rank for the keywords your page is targetting. If your page is about the Ascari KZ1 supercar, but all the links to your page say “cookies”, Google will see the disconnect and write off your page as irrelevant. Incidentally, this is what happens when you buy an old domain hoping to put your content on it and get an instant ranking boost… there will be a disconnect between all the links pointing to your domain and what your content is about. Whoops. Bye-Bye Relevance.

Off-page reputation mainly refers to the anchor text within links pointing to your site, and the content of the Title tags of those pages. On-page content is what your page is seen to be about… its topic or subject… which is decided by the page title, bold words, headlines, the domain name and words in the URL as well as all the words on the page acting in concert to give your page a subject. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) helps decide what your on-page subject is by checking words on the page against other words it would expect to find from other indexed pages on the same subject… for example, is your page about Apple Computers or Apple Pie… finding the words crust, sugar and oven would indicate the latter.

When the off-page reputation agrees with the on-page content, you get “Relevance”. When you combine Trust with Relevance you get Trulevance… which means Google loves you and you’ll get tons of traffic!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Current posts, seo, PageRank. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.