The way I see it, Search Engine Optomisation is for individual pages. Meta tags, keywords, title and text are used to give search engines signals. These signals are intended to raise the individual page higher in search listings. However this doesn’t mean you can’t use relevancy or that normal SEO practices replaces it. Indeed, they are very complimentary to each other.
How relevancy is related to SEO
Relevancy is a site wide effort, SEO can be see as page related effort. In my previous series of posts about DIYSEO, I explained how you can perform your own optomisation.
If there are common keywords used on all pages, that could be seen as relevancy – common words linking the pages together. So you could consider the normal SEO practices as being a weak form of relevance.
Using SEO to enhance relevancy
SEO, in the most part, uses keywords threaded through the page. They get inserted in to meta tags, page titles, header tags and of course the text. The intention is to show search engines the words we want them to see. We do this to ensure our pages get found in search results and to ensure a high up listing.
Relevancy demonstrates to search engines the topic of a whole site, not just individual pages. We can do this by linking related posts, the use of anchor text and more. See my previous posts for more about relevancy
If a page is optomised for a set of keywords, we show the search engines the topic of the page. If that topic is used to also demonstrate relevancy, we can only but do better in search listings.
The best way to go is to use a set of keywords that not only promote a page but also relate to the sites topic or theme. Variations of the keywords – that still relate to the site – can be used for each page.
On the face of it, the act of doing both SEO and relevancy seem complicated. However, once you start optomising a page, creating relevancy comes naturally.
Your thoughts…
If you are involved with SEO, I would very much like to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment or drop me a line via the contact page.
Bob, largely I agree with you although I would take issue with SEO being only an individual page effort. One of the most important aspects of SEO has got to be relevancy, and your approach would definitely enhance a website’s overall relevancy score. We recommend clients use a human approach and try to demonstrate how each and every page of their website relates to the rest of the website. Contextual links, breadcrumbs and categorising all count towards this.
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Thanks for your comment Tony. I always welcome another point of view. Not sure if it’s just me but traditional SEO methods often comes across as something you do to a page. Not something you do site wide. Perhaps I read too much about affiliate marketing which is often single page sites…
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