Search Engine Optimization (known as search engine optimisation in Australia, or abbreviated as SEO worldwide), is a field of internet marketing that contains the techniques used in attempting to rank a website or webpage highly within a search engine, most frequently Google.

Search Engine Optimization is heavily dependent upon website optimization. The better you optimize a website for ranking in the SERPs, the higher chance it will rank. Likewise the more offpage link juice you have pointing towards your site through the use of backlinks, the greater your site will rank. Onpage and offpage optimization are all things that the Search Engine Optimizer will look at it, but just what else is in the mix that determines a sites ranking?

One of those things, is Trust Rank. The more trust that a site has, the more Google will want to rank that site in the SERPs if it provides relevant, linked to content. If you have two sites with the exact same number of backlinks from the same sources with the same anchor text, and both sites were correctly optimized for the same keywords on-page, then which site would Google be more likely to rank higher? Odds are, it would be the site with the greater trust.

So just how is trust determined in such a manner? Well, you need to look at a number of variables, but two important ones are just how old the backlinks pointing to a site are, and how long the domain itself has been indexed in Google. You see, the longer that a page is indexed by Google, the greater the likelihood that the page can be trusted as it hasn’t done anything adverse to draw notice to itself and become deindexed. On the other hand a new site with an equivalent amount of links has yet to prove itself, and thus may even be placed into a sandbox period before it can demonstrate some degree of trust.

To sum it all up, the amount of trust a page has in Google’s eyes is an essential element to search engine optimization, and any internet marketer will want to learn the benefits of having a trustworthy site as opposed to a non-trustworthy one.