Marcus Tober of Searchmetrics Explains Relevancy & Ranking Factors

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello I'm Marin nand and welcome to another episode of search engine Journal today I'm at the search metrics conference and I'm lucky enough to be sitting with the founder and CTO Marcus Marcus you're going to be talking about relevancy and ranking factors explain more about that yeah you know um in the past many people did SEO really really in in a very bad way and like uh you know only keyword driven and and links driven and I explained today uh what is really relevant and how you can measure relevancy so for example content you know if if you have uh content that that's not fitting in into uh the relevancy of search engines I will explain what you have to do to have relevant content and ranking factors is is you know the correlations of of uh many different factors like you know how long the title Tech must be or how the link should should look like and and all these these um kinds of different parameters for search engines so take for example um social signals what are your thoughts on those that's a good question um yeah social signals are a good signal um because social signal is also a user signal so if you have a high correlation uh on rankings for social signals that also means that the search engines rank uh a high shared content higher than not not so good shared content right and it could be that there's a very strong cation and we we we also you know check that that Google+ has an impact on indexation but it means in the end that Google wants to rank good content and the user wants to share good content right right and so um what are some uh tips or advice you'd give for people who want to improve their their ranking and relevancy so at first they want to know they have to know the intention of the user so for the quer so if you have payday loans for example and you have um you know just the plain text for pay loans maybe that does doesn't fit the intention of the user so in in the beginning you have to be sure what is the intention of the user and then you have to check what is also relevant for that specific term and do I have to cover other terms for example if I want to rank for payday loans or I want to rank for car insurance so in a financial area which is really competitive I have to know okay maybe I need a uh um a calculator maybe I need uh um some testimonials maybe I need you know very good content that describes the topic and this is this is important to know that I have to care first about what the user really needs fantastic any other tips to rank to have good rankings yeah you know the the different parameters um changed over time so in the so three years ago it was really about link building and now it's about link building too but with quality links so Google is looking on uh you know brand links Google is looking on natural links so some months ago met Cuts told that rdid link for example can now harm your rankings and some years ago widget links were you know the big the big booster right so the game Chang and I think um it's not talk about some factors it's it's really um about have good content and content in a way that the user is is willing to share the content fantastic if people want to find out more and maybe follow you or connect with you how do they do that so the easiest way is on Twitter so at Marcus TOA is my my uh Twitter handle and uh would be happy if you follow and you can also send me Direct messages on Twitter Marcus thank you very much this looks like it's going to be a great event have a wonderful day thank you thank you I'm marur nans with search engine Journal I'll see you next time [Music]