Category: SEO

The most important thing for SEO in a website is its content. Content lends credibility, builds trust and inspires others to backlink to you website. The greatest content in the internet are the most backlinked and the most visited ones.

Even Google’s content policy such as the Helpful Content Update and the Google Spam Update focus on improving the content in a Website.

Impact of Quality Content on SEO

The internet is built on sharing information through articles, news, attractive images, infographics, and videos. The better the quality of content, the wider will be its appeal and greater its following.

The strongest point of a website from an SEO perspective that I have seen in my career is the quality of content. Even websites which have poor UI, like the one below, has more than 29,000 backlinks, a DA (Ahrefs) of 42 and a monthly viewer count of 3 Million.

Factors Contributing to Quality Content

There are several factors that contribute to high quality of content. Some of them are:

1. Uniqueness
2. Originality
3. Freshness
4. Comprehensiveness
5. User Engagement

1. Uniqueness

The internet has more than a billion websites. Even the smallest niches has hundreds of players. In such an environment, there is a need to create a website that stands out.

The benefit of creating a unique website (whether unique in content, graphics or interactive-ness) makes the website and its information stand out.

A new approach which I have seen trending in creating unique websites is the approach of “gamification”. It is a method which uses gaming components such as progress bar, time needed to complete reading and other techniques to let users estimate the effort needed to read the article.

2. Originality

Google is a search engine which basically runs by giving information to others and running ads on those pages. Therefore, it is 100% obvious that it needs high quality content that satisfies user needs.

One such factor of high quality content is the originality. If a website is already ranking on Google (whichever page), there is no need to rank a website which posts the same information. This is also a reason why unedited AI content is often punished. It adds nothing new to the internet.

Another way how originality impacts the quality of content is through Google’s EEAT Rules.

• Experience is proven when you add some real life experience to your website.

• Expertise is only proven through new insights and new information.

All these new information contributes to the originality of your website and therefore impacts its Google rankings.

3. Freshness

Fresh content is always preferred in search topics which are time sensitive. For example, SEO factors that did better in 2010 (keyword stuffing, bulk backlinks) are obsolete and these days Google punishes those websites that use them.

Freshness is also a great weapon in the hands of well experienced SEOs. Let me share you an anecdote.

In 2022, when I worked as an SEO for a crypto news website, I saw an article on “Future Trading Bots” with dropping traffic. Upon updating the article with latest information such as new bot pricing, new benefits with new bots and deleting some information on defunct bots, we saw a lot of instant progress.

Within 3 days, the website was ranking on Rank 1 of Google. Below is a screenshot of the same.

4. Comprehensiveness

1. After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?
2. Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience?

Google Helpful Content Guidelines

When you want to rank for a comprehensive topic, for example, “The Best Web Developer in India“, you need to make sure that your article is comprehensive. It means that it covers all the topics that can come to someone’s mind when reading the article.

Suggestion: If some related topics cannot be accommodated in the same article, create a link to a page or post that explains the article. For example, this page contains the following link to an article on EEAT Rules, which are most essential in Google rankings.

5. User Engagement

Engaging the user is perhaps the most difficult part of producing quality content. Most users have a attention span of less than 5 seconds.

With my marketing experience and the knowledge I gained through my MBA, I know it for sure that users do not want to read an article unless it startles them somehow. This might be an unknown fact, a summary article, list of top 5, 10 or 15 things or any other such information.

In our practice, we follow the 3-30-3 Rule.

• You need to catch someone’s attention for 3 seconds.
• Once they devote 3 seconds, you have their attention for another 30 seconds.
• Once you capture attention for 30 seconds, you have their attention for the next 3 minutes at least.

To execute this technique, we first use a hook line in the title. For example this article has the title, “The Most Important Factor for SEO in a Website”, which is kind of a summary article.

Once they are hooked, we use the the intro paragraph to answer the question in a straightforward manner. It hooks them for another 30 odd seconds.

Finally, we try to keep the article below 3 minutes to read, but that depends on topic to topic.

Conclusion

Content produces the strongest impact in SEO of your website. Rest all other SEO factors come second.

Any content that is not helpful will not retain its ranking on Google or any search engine no matter the amount of backlinks. High quality content is created through a will to share something new and and arranging information in a way that helps the reader absorb the most information.

This is how you can make sure to make the most impact in your website’s SEO.

EEAT is the summary of all the rules, guidelines and best practices that are used to rank a website in search queries. They stand for Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust.

What is EEAT in SEO?

EEAT is the culmination of years of tracking website’s performance through several hundred factors. All of these factors can be summarized as EEAT which means Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust. If a website owner or SEO takes adequate care of all four aspects, they can easily rank their website on Google search.

Experience

Experience means whether the writer of any article, blog, webpage, etc., has actually used or experienced the product or service on their own. Google wants only real users of the products write about them because it leads to the addition of new information which was might not be present in the internet.

Expertise

Expertise means whether the writer is expert enough to tell others about the product or service. This was done to improve the accuracy of the information that is being sent to the end user who is reading that specific article or blog post. For example, when you are searching about tax filing, a tax practitioner would be in better position to explain than an individual who files tax. Again someone who has filed tax would be more valuable than someone who just knows the rules and has never filed tax returns.

Authority

Authority is the measure of how much information does a website have on a given topic. It helps search engines know if you have all the information required to satisfy a user’s query and check whether the information is deep enough.

Websites with higher authority usually tend to have higher number of in-depth articles around a given topic. But, it should not be misunderstood as the number of articles. Higher authority is

Further, authority is built over time. Posting a huge number of articles in a very short period of time violates Google’s policy of generating content in bulk. Often these websites are punished and de-indexed from Google.

Below is a screenshot of a website which lost traffic due to bad content. The website was created by Mark William Cook to test AI content strategies. Though it had 10,000 pages, all pages were filled with AI content. The website was later punished by Google.

On the other hand, a website which has consistently posted articles over time, accumulates higher authority over the period and therefore maintains a consistent ranking over time.

Below is an example of news website which ranks well on Google. It has 1886 articles that were posted since 2006.

Trust

Trust is the measure of how much other websites trust your website. This is usually seen as the number of high quality and industry related backlinks that your page has.

High quality backlinks mean those which come from website that already have a very high EEAT score. Typically these websites are well recognized within their industry.

For example, AHREFS, a well known SEO tool company can be considered a trustful website because it has a very high number of (4 million+) backlinks.

This helps Google know that the website is highly trusted by a huge number of users/websites. So, when AHREFS posts something, it easily gets to the top page of Google. Though, the page is still examined for quality.

For the search term, “top seo factors”, we can see that AHREFS easily ranks for the term on Page 1.

Why is EEAT Critical for Better Google Rankings

Google is a search engine, therefore it would always want that users who use it to search for information would always find relevant, updated and accurate information.

To make sure that information is relevant, it uses experience as a metric.

For accuracy of information, it should have been written by an expert who has some experience in the field.

Again, a website would only be considered an authority over a certain topic if they have demonstrated a good understanding over that topic. Google only comes to know this when it finds interlinked articles in your website around any certain topic.

Finally, trust is build when people show confidence on your shared information. This trust in the world of websites is generally shown in terms of backlinks, which are links from other websites that link to yours. Usually the more backlinks from high quality websites you get, the better is your trust score.

A Secret Metric

There is one more metric to compare websites which fulfill all the above criterion. This metric is the freshness of information. The fresher the information is, the better are its chances of ranking, provided that all other criteria are fulfilled.

Fresh information would include recent developments in the product or service that is being discussed in the post or webpage.

How to Best Optimize EEAT for Your Website?

Below are a few suggestions to improve on all factors that constitute the EEAT score that I have learnt over the last few years working as SEO.

Experience

• Before writing about anything, make sure you have used that product/service or have gathered user reviews.
• Write about your personal and other people’s experiences in the page/post.

Expertise

• Gather knowledge and expertise via online courses, seminars, discussions, and other networking events.
• If you have a degree such as an MBA, make sure to include it in the about the author section. There are several free courses where you can built your expertise.
• Include a brief detail about the person writing the page/post.

Authority

• Before you hope to see some traffic on your website, make sure you have covered the topic in depth. In my experience, it takes 100+ articles on an average to build authority. This number varies in different search terms.
• In YMYL niches, do not try to post AI content because it adds no new value to the information available online.

Trust

• Only acquire backlinks that have a low spam score. You can check spam score online with any free tool.
• Do not engage in getting links from websites that link to a lot other websites.
• Google keeps a tab on websites that sell links, make sure to avoid them.
• Get involved in Press Releases which is emerging as a new trend for link building.
• Disown low quality backlinks. You can do this through the Google disavow tool.

Backlinks are those links which are pointed towards your website from another website. These links are a vote of confidence to your website, and help in ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo. Bing and Baidu.

Further, there are four types of backlinks based on , do-follow, no follow, with anchor texts, without anchor texts. Based on the combination of these types, there could be several more types of backlinks.

Why do I need Backlinks?

Backlinks are those links that points users to your website from any other website. These links are often added to provide some kind of reference such as facts, data, original source, etc. The benefit of adding such links is that, since you are providing verifiable information, it increases your website’s trust in front of the user.

Backlinks divert traffic from the website which hosts it and towards the website to which it points.

Further, backlinks provide you with much needed link juice, a metric which helps in building the Domain Authority(DA) of your website. Higher, the number of backlinks and referring domains, higher will be its Domain Authority. This high DA helps in easy rankings on Google which gets you more traffic.

Here is an example of how beneficial backlinks are:

The above image shows a Google search result for a search query on : “how does a mobile work?”

Although the first website has a lower domain authority, it has a much high number of backlinks which helps it rank higher than a website with higher domain authority.

However, there are several other factors, than just backlinks, that help decide which page should rank higher, like on-page SEO, quality of content, comprehensiveness, etc. Yet, in my personal experience, backlinks have the highest impact in rankings.

What are the Types of Backlinks

There are different types of backlinks from different perspectives.

In terms of HTML, there can be the following categories of backlinks. List is non-exhaustive. You can find an exhaustive list on Geeks for Geeks.

• alternate, which shows the alternate version of the page
• author, which connects to the author of the page
• dns-prefetch, it mandates a browser to perform DNS resolution of the target resource’s origin
• help, specifies that the link in pointed towards a help page
• icon, points towards an icon image
• license, shows that the link showing details about the intellectual property
• next, shows the link for the next page in order
• pingback, shows the specified address of the pingback server

Based on whether the source website considers it an organic link:

• Do Follow Links, are the highest quality links. They tell Google that the website is an important and organic backlink.
• No Follow Links, are those which a website asks Google to ignore.

Based on whether an anchor text is provided in the source page.

• Without Anchor: These are the links that do not have an anchor text associated with the target page and the link is simply mentioned.
• With Anchor Text: These links have some anchor text that can provide a context regarding the nature of the target link.

Frequently Asked Questions

There is an myth regarding .online websites that they do not rank well on Google. In this article, we will dispel that myth and prove it with verifiable evidence that these websites do rank well.

You can explore this post for a complete list of new-age domain extensions like dot online.

Why are .online domains popular?

The domain extension dot online or .online is a popular TLD being used basically by tech enthusiasts worldwide. The main reason for the popularity of such domain extensions are their cost factors.

Price of .online domains from multiple vendors(in India) for first year:

1. Godaddy: ₹499
2. Hostinger: ₹72
3. Namecheap: ₹81
4. Hostgator: ₹852
5. Google: ₹2150

Note: Prices are subject to change in the future.

We can observe that most of the websites offer it at a very low price for the first year which makes it easier for Small and Medium Businesses to test their digital presence without incurring a high cost.

History of .online Domains

The dot online domain TLDs were made by ICANN in 2015 after an initial announcement in 2012. ICANN is the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, a nonprofit organization based out of the USA.

Bhavin Turakhia and his company Radix are the current owners of .online TLD which means anyone buying a .online TLD worldwide buys them directly or indirectly from them.

Initially, .online was jointly owned by Radix, Namecheap, and Tucows After his acquisition of .online TLD, it saw over 38,000 purchases(registries) in the first 24 hours making it one of the fastest-growing gTLDs. In 2018, .online passed 1 Million registries.

Some Disadvantages

These domains have recently come under suspicion because of their abuse by black-hat SEO practitioners. We at Ingeniare AI presume this to be the primary reason for most of the following issues.

1. SEO Issues with .online Domains

Flagged as Spam

We have seen several .online websites being flagged as spam because of their usage by parties that are involved in unfair SEO practices like link farming. It is a practice where several cheap domains are purchased by someone who sells backlinks from them at a cheap cost.

Non-Indexing Issues

Recently, we have come across a few digital businesses which have their primary website on a .online domain. Their main concern is despite using the best tools available, they are not getting indexed on Google.

2. High Renewal Cost

Compared to a .com or a .in TLD, .online TLD costs as much as thrice the price of its peers. The following are examples of second-year renewal costs of .online domains.

• Godaddy: ₹3249
• Hostinger: ₹2659
• Namecheap: ₹5412

Note: Prices are subject to change in the future.

However, There are Some Benefits Too

.online domains have grown in popularity not only because of their cost but also because they provide a good host of benefits too.

1. Available for Competitive Names

With more than 350 million domains worldwide, it should not be surprising for you to find your business .com or . in domain name already registered by someone else. In that case there would be no option other than buying a domain like .online.

2. Niche Targeting

For businesses focussed on online services like streaming, gaming, home solutions, online tutoring, etc.. the .online domains show a commitment to niche markets.

They also show digital adoption among small and medium businesses for whom they were initially made.

Do .online Domains Affect SEO?

Google claims that domain names and TLDs do not affect Google SEO. However, they will surely affect a person’s perception and trust. A user is more inclined to click on domains with established TLDs like .com.

Also, the leaked source code from Yandex shows that search engines may still be secretly preferring to rank .com websites first, which was the case in Yandex.

Solutions for .Online Domains

We at Ingeniare AI are still exploring the issue of concrete evidence, however, we have some remedies for businesses using .online domains that are affected by SEO.

• Getting high-quality organic backlinks is the most effective solution for such domains.
• Combine this with frequent sitemap submissions on the Google search console.
• Make sure your content is AI free and your website is not punished by some Google update.

Successful .Online Domains

Over our experience as an agency, we have noticed a few .online domains ranking for different search terms.

(Data as of 11 November 2023)

• freemba.online ranks #28 for the term “free mba” and 3rd for the term “freemba“.

• himalayanrudraksha.online ranks #2 for the search term “rudraksha mala”.

Frequently Asked Questions