In a further bid to deliver relevant results, search engines also consider various off-the-page factors. They include:

• Inward and outbound links.
• Click-through measurement.

The click-through measurement is the assessment of what pages are selected from the results of a particular search.  If some high-ranking pages aren’t frequently attracting clicks, they may be dropped in favour of others that do attract clicks.

This will be beyond your control other than by being influenced by your choice of Title Tag content (what the user sees within the link at the top of your listing) during the search engine optimisation of your content.

However, during your search engine optimisation activity, you may be able to influence the inbound and outbound links - what sites are being linked to or from (in terms of quality and relevance) and the text used within those links (meaningful and usefully descriptive content).

This is, currently, particularly important of Google which uses links as part of its PageRank assessment (the system is uses for ranking web pages).

From Google:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.

‘In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyses the page that casts the vote.

‘Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

However, while off-the-page factors may always have influence as the search engine sands shift (try saying that quickly!), the true and focused content of your web site will win through (if you’ve also used search engine optimisation techniques).

That is, as long as relevancy matters more than payment for position.