In article Search Engine Ranking Factors
we've classified search engine ranking factors into four groups: page content, back links,
page traffic and user feedback. Those are the factors that search engine should and could possibly rank
search results, but none of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo serach and MSN search) are even close to the ranking criteria
listed in that article. After all, we're still in the very early stage of search technology. Major search engines rank search results
by page content and back links only as of this writing. Search Engine Optimization includes on-page SEO and off-page (link building)
SEO. On-page SEO is the effort to improve rankings on search engines by optimizing page content.
Following a few simple rules you can make your pages both user-frinedly and search engine friendly to improve user-experience and
your search engine rankings.
Keyword Selection
Web publishers use different words or phrases for the same topic or subject. Some of keywords or keyword phrases are searched more
frequently than others. To maximize the search engine traffic, you want to use the keywords that is mostly used by Web users when
searching for information. The number of times a term or phrase is searched in a month or a day is defined as keyword popularity.
One of your Web pages may be ranked #1 for certain keywords. If not many users search for those keywords, the rank is useless or
less valuable.
Next we look at the competition of the keywords we're interested in. There're many ways to measure the keyword competition, a simple of
doing this is to look at the range of the PageRank values of the top 10 listings on the search result
page for your keyword or phrase. This is easy if you have installed Google Toolbar for IE.
See Build Website Traffic from Search Engines
for details and examples for keyword popularity, keyword competition and Keyword suggestion tools. There're tools out there that show
PR values as part of the search results.
Keywords should be specific (3 or more word search terms) to summarize the content of a page. If the keywords are too general and your pages
don't have a higher PageRank among other things, users will never find those pages. Specific keywords allow
pages with lower PageRank (and less incoming backlinks) to place higher on the search engines for your targeting search terms. A page with
general information may fail to attract users' attention even if they visit the page.
Page Title
Keywords in page title has been and will always be an important factor in computing relevance in search engine rankings. Page title is the
most important factor that users may or may not visit your page when they scan the search results. The weight of page title in relevance
may vary from search engine to search engine, and from index update to index update. Google's recent update, apparently places
less weight on page title than before in an effort to minimize the impact of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on search results.
This may filter out some spammy pages, but it appeartly filter out some germs and reduced the revelance of search results for specific
search terms.
A page title generally have two parts: a keyword or key phrase that are friendly to users and search engines, and verbiage that
distinguishes your page from other pages which use the same key phrases. The first part improves your search engine rankings, and the
second part increases the chance of your pages will be visited once they're ranked well on the search results.
Body Content
Body content text naturally confirms and expands the page title for well-written content. Link or anchor text (words appearing in hyperlinks),
keywords with emphasis, keywords in normal text, quality of the content and length of content are all factored into search engine
ranking algorithm. Google's Superbowl update on Feb. 2, 2005 placed some weight on keywords semantically relevant to the primary keywords. Besides looking at
particular keywords, the search engine looks at the related keywords. Use of related keywords will help your rankings in Google.
- Keywords in link text are more important than keywords in normal text. Text (link text) points to another web page
should naturally deserve more attention to users than normal text. If users can't find what they want on a page, they may follow
links to other interesting pages. This is likely the case when users search for general terms and when users don't know exactly
what they are looking for.
- Keywords with emphasis keywords in H1 - H4 tags, bold and strong tags are usually weighted more than normal text.
- Keywords in normal text for high-quality sites in search engine's eye, keywords appeared only once in a document may
generate some traffic too.
- Relevant keywords the search engines of the future will likely
rank search results based on understanding of page content by looking at the related keywords, not limited to statistics of keywords
on documents.
- Focus of keywords refers to the common theme of all keywords or key phrases within a particular page. You may have many
keywords on a page, but those keywords should contribute to the expansions of the page topic. If your page addresses two topics,
it is always a good idea to split the page into two. A good page is a unit of content.
- Length of the content The Web Users prefer to view pages with specific content that was exactly what
they were looking for, rather than search a piece of content on a lengthy page. My preference for the optimum length of page content
is between 300 - 1000 words for content pages.
- Text Quality, such as spelling and grammar errors, can partially tell the quality of a page content.
- Simple and Valid HTML Code may help improve your rankings too. The search engines may think pages with invalid
HTML code as documents with low quality. They may have difficulty to understand the complex HTML code.
Keywords in URLs
The trend is to weight less on keywords in URLs in search engine rankings, but it's still useful for good user-experience. If you have
a page for interracial dating it makes sense to name the file "interracial_dating.html" or "interracial_dating.php". It makes sense to
name a page neutrally as "12345.html", as long as it's not named "france_travel.html".
Relevance of Linking
We don't have control to who link to our pages, but we're fully responsible for what pages we link to. Linking to high PageRank pages
won't boost the PageRank of your page. Linking to irrelevant pages, however, reduces the relevance of your page content and the rankings in
search engines.
Search engines is the aggregation of average Web users. When we say Search Engine Optimization, we mean user-friendly.
Never use any SEO techniques if they will not make your pages user-friendly.
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