Search Engine Optimization

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4. Ranking Factors

From all of the above it’s clear that the greater prominence you give your own web site, its keywords and other contents, the more seriously it will be taken by the search engine.

(a) Location of your keywords

Special attention should be paid to the HTML title tag. Search engines usually assign much higher importance to well-placed keywords in the title tag than to regular content.

Search engines also like to see keywords appear close to the top of any web page. Keywords in the headline, the top left of the page, the first and the last paragraphs of text will be given special attention.

(b) Frequency of your keywords

Now this is not quite like our news editor (after all, news items are not supposed to be too repetitive!) but it still reminds us that we are in the world of advertising, and of the fact that repetition will get attention.

However, there is a major caveat: don't indiscriminately over-repeat your keywords. Search engines hate that. They not only hate it, they may well penalize such repetition (generally known as keyword spamming).

What search engines do like, though, is the intelligent, nicely readable placement of keywords which appear, within limits, more frequently in comparison to other words. Those pages with a higher frequency (keyword density) will merit more attention from the search engines.

The challenge, then, is to write readable, naturally flowing web content (Headlines and Sub-headlines included) with as many relevant keywords as possible, without too many repetitions. And don't forget the title tags and descriptions.

(c) Size of your keywords

In SEO, size does matter. Headlines, which are usually in larger fonts, get more attention than regular text – as long as, of course, they contain keywords too. Bold and underlined words will be rated higher as well.

Now this is almost like good advice to our newspaper editor - remember?

(d) Off-the-page Factors

This is one of the better known but often misunderstood factors. We are talking about links pointing to one’s web site (“web site popularity”).

Again a real life example can be useful here. Your popularity in society is deemed much higher if you get a lot of phone calls, e-mails, or visitors. Conversely, it’s a sign of being ignored if no one calls or writes.

The same is true in SEO. The more web sites have links or references pointing to your web site, the more popular you can consider yourself. And so will the search engines! It’s therefore very useful and in many circumstances a necessity to have links to your site placed on other web sites.

The common misconception here is that any link on any web site will do, and that many links, from many sites, will increase your popularity. This is true if - and only if - those other sites are themselves popular (= reputable, high ranking or well-visited). It is not true for obscure, very low-ranking web sites.

Link exchanges (“Give me yours, I’ll give you mine”) have mushroomed over the past few years. Often, they charge an arm and a leg for establishing link relationships whose value is uncertain at best. Occasionally they can be beneficial but often they are not. Getting back to our social example: most people will judge you by the quality of your friends, not their quantity (mind you, exceptions do exist … ). The same goes for search engines and links.

The problem is that it’s difficult to find highly-ranked web sites that will accept your links, especially if you are still relatively unknown – unless you pay for it. But that’s another topic.

We hope this overview was a useful introduction to SEO. We don’t claim it to be anything else.

Also, we are aware that this introduction to SEO is not complete - far from it. The Powwwerpages SEO Report (coming soon) will be much more detailed and will provide SEO tips and guidelines.

If you have any questions, please contact us. Although our free SEO service is intended for our customers only, we won’t refuse to answer short general questions from anyone.

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