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) Your web site's contents

Also remember: repetition will get attention. After all, promoting your web site is very similar to advertising.

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 with well-placed keywords without too many repetitions.

And that's just the beginning. Your web pages have many other components, some visible to the user, some only to a web programmer, all of which can and should be optimized for ranking and visibility. Good SEO is vital for any web site - and although it can get quite technical, it's not as difficult as it seems. We at Powwwerpages can help - FREE.

To receive more totally FREE SEO details and get your web site's ranking and popularity zooming, click here.

(b) 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 the search engines will rank you higher, too! 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. Our SEO Reports and Newsletters (sign up here) are more detailed and will provide SEO tips and guidelines. And they are FREE and come with no obligation.

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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