Your website’s perceived importance is the search engines interpretation of how popular your website is. This is gauged by how many other sites link to yours and in what context.

There are probably lots of other people that offer the same service you do and therefore lots of other pages about it. Not to mention all the other pages that may not be anything to do with what you do. E.g. a news article headed “Jordon’s divorce solicitor says ‘Peter Andre….’” could appear for the term “divorce solicitor”.

When there are lotd of websites that are equally well optimised for a certain term, which there always is, then perceived importance becomes a very important deciding factor. Perceived importance often trumps relevancy, especially on Google as they invented this ‘popularity’ model and it is the key to Google’s success. for example www.will-solicitor.co.uk does not appear anywhere within the first 200 results for the search “will solicitor”! (tested on 03/11/2009). It is obviously relevant and therefore the reason must be because it does not have a high enough perceived importance (not enough other sites linking to it in the right context).

Some sites have only a handful of links and others like youtube have many millions. People are much more likely to link to a youtube video from their site or blog whenever they find a funny or useful video. However, they are very unlikely to link to a commercial website in the same way “check out my accountants blog, it’s great…” ?? Very unlikely unless they are incentivised to do so. In reality the majority of Commercial website that generate business through the internet had to go out and get links to their website the same way that I do for my clients.