The easiest way to illustrate this is by means of an example. I know that the Guggenheim Museum in New York is a relatively important art gallery, as it is cited as such by many important sources. However, the Guggenheim focuses on modern art, so if I were searching for seventeenth-century landscapes I would be unlikely to find its content relevant to my search.
If, however, I were searching for the art of Piet Mondrian, then Guggenheim’s importance – when combined with its relevance to Mondrian and his work – should absolutely ensure that it appears near the top of the rankings. Try the search “Piet Mondrian” in Google or Yahoo! and you will see that the Guggenheim does indeed feature in the top 10 (although MSN and Ask notably fail to include it there). So how do the people at Google do this? Well, as they themselves put it, the search engine:
goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
In short, the Guggenheim page about Piet Mondrian ranks so well because many sites about the artist (with lots of text containing the word Mondrian) link to the Guggenheim, often with Mondrian in the link text. See for example www.pietmondrian.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian.
This sophisticated process is known as text matching. From my years of SEO experience, the most important of all these text-matching factors is link quality, where as many as possible of the links to your pages use your phrases that pay in their anchor text. The closer the anchor text is to your desired keyphrases, the greater the link quality will be. In the next section I will prove to you just how important link quality is.
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