Internet Marketing Company - Florida web site designers

 How SE Rank Pages

The first thing to remember is that the search engines rank "pages", not "sites". What this means is that you will not achieve a high ranking for your site by attempting to optimize your main page for ten different keyword phrases. However, different pages of your site WILL appear up the list for different key phrases if you optimize each page for just one of them. If you can't use your keyword in the domain name, no problem – use it in the URL of some page within your site, e.g. in the file name of the page. This page will rise in relevance for the given keyword. All search engines show you URLs of specific PAGES when you search – not just the root domain names like www.klicktwice.com but the paths like www.klicktwice.com/webdesign/index.htm.

Second, understand that the search engines do not see the graphics and JavaScript dynamics your page uses to captivate visitors. You can use a graphic image of written text that says you sell beautiful Christmas gifts. But it does not tell the search engine that your website is related to Christmas Gifts – unless you use an ALT attribute where you write about it.

Here's an example to illustrate.

What the visitor sees:

What the search engine will read in this place:

<img src="http://training.klicktwice.com/images/assets/Stg2_St2_L5/0004.png" width="250" height="100" class="image" />

As you see there's nothing in the code which could tell the search robots that the content relates to "Christmas", "Gifts", or "Beautiful". The situation will change if we rewrite the code like this:

<imgsrc="http://klicktwice.com/images/assets/Stg2_St2_L5/0004.png" width="250" height="100" class="image" alt="Beautiful Christmas Gifts!!!" />

As you can see we've added the ALT attribute with the value that corresponds to what the image tells your visitors. Initially, the "alt" attribute was meant to provide alternative text for an image that for some reason could not be shown by the visitor's browser. Nowadays it has acquired one more function – to bring the same message to the search engines that the image itself brings to human Web surfers.

The same concerns the usage of JavaScript. Look at these two examples:

1. Visit our page about discounted Samsung Monitors!

2. <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!--document.write("Visit our page about " + goods[Math.round(0.5 +(3.99999 * Math.random()))-1]); --> </script>

The first example is what visitors see, the second is the source code script that produces the output. Assume the search engine spider is intelligent enough to read the script (however, actually not all the spiders do); is there anything in the code that can tell it about the Samsung Monitor? Hardly.

As a rule, search engine spiders have a limit on loading page content. For instance, the Googlebot will not read more than 100 KB of your page, even though it is instructed to look whether there are keywords at the end of your page. So if you use keywords somewhere beyond this limit, this is invisible to spiders. Therefore, you may want to acquire the good habit of not overloading the HEAD section of your page with scripts and styles. Better link them from outside files, because otherwise they just push away your important textual content.

There are many more examples of relevancy indicators a spider considers when visiting your page, such as the proximity of important words to the beginning of the page. Here, as well, the spider does not necessarily see the same things a human visitor would see. For instance, a left-hand menu pane on your Web page. People visiting your site will generally not first pay attention to this, focusing instead on the main section. The spider, however, will read your menu before passing to the main content – simply because it is closer to the beginning of the code.

Remember: during the first visit, the spider does not yet know which words your page relates to! Keep in mind this simple truth. By reading your HTML code, the spider (which is just a computer program) must be able guess the exact words that make up the theme of your site.

Then, the spider will compress your page and create the index associated with it. To keep things simple, you can think of this index as an enumeration of all words found on your page, with several important parameters associated with each word: their proximity, frequency, etc.

Certainly, no one really knows what the real indices look like, but the principals are as they have been outlined here. The words that are high in the list according to the main criteria will be considered your keywords by the spider. In reality, the parameters are quite numerous and include off-page factors as well, because the spider is able to detect the words every other page out there uses when linking to your page, and thus calculate your relevance to those terms also.

When a Web surfer queries the search engine, it pulls out all pages in its database that contain the user's query. And here the ranking begins: each page has a number of "on-page" indicators associated with it, as well as certain page-independent indicators (like PageRank). A combination of these indicators determines how well the page ranks.

It's important to keep this in mind: after you have made your page attractive for visitors, ask yourself whether you have also made it readable for the search engine spiders.  

   How to optimize for Google

Most important for Google are three factors: PageRank, link anchor text and semantics.

PageRank is an absolute value which is regularly calculated by Google for each page it has in its index. Later in this course we will give you a detailed description, but for now it's just important to know that the number of links you've got from other sites outside your domain matters greatly, as well as the link quality. The latter means that in order to give you some weight, the sites linking to yours must themselves have high PageRank, be content-rich and regularly updated.

MiniRank/Local Rank is a modification of the PageRank based on the link structure of your single site only. Since search engines rank pages, not sites, certain pages of your site will rank higher for given keywords than others. Local Rank has a significant influence on the general PageRank.

Anchor text is the text of the links that point to your pages. For instance, if someone links to you with the words "see this great website", this is a useless link. However, let's say you sell car tyres and a link from another site to yours says "car tyres from leading brands", such a link will boost your rank when someone searches for car tyres on Google.

Semantics is a new factor that appears to have made the biggest difference to the results. This term refers to the meaning of words and their relationships. Google bought a company called Applied Semantics back in 2003 and has been using the technology for their AdSense contextual advertising program. According to the principles of applied semantics, the crawler attempts to define which words mean the same thing and which ones are always used together.

For example, if there are a certain number of pages in Google's index saying that an executive desk is a piece of office furniture, Google associates the two phrases. After this, a page about executive desks using the keywords "office furniture" won't show up in a search for the keywords ''executive desk". On the other hand, a page that mentions "executive desk" will rank better if it mentions "office furniture".

Now, there are two other terms related to Google's way of ranking pages: Hilltop and Sandbox.

Hilltop is an algorithm that was created in 1999. Basically, it looks at the relationship between "Expert" and "Authority" pages. An "Expert" is a page that links to lots of other relevant documents. An "Authority" is a page that has links pointing to it from the "Expert" pages.

In theory, Google would find "Expert" pages and then the pages that they link to would rank well. Pages on sites like Yahoo, DMOZ, college sites and library sites would be considered experts.

Sandbox refers to Google's algorithm which detects how old your page is and how long ago it has been updated. Usually pages with stale content tend to gradually slip down the result list, while new pages just crawled initially have higher positions than they would if based on PageRank only. However, some time after gaining boosted positions, new website disappear from the top places in search results, since Google wants to verify whether your website is really continued and was not created with the sole purpose to benefit from artificially high rankings over the short term. The period when a website is unable to make it to the top of search results is referred to as "being in the sandbox". This can last from 6 months to one year, then the positions usually restore gradually. However, not all brand new site owners observe the sandbox effect on their own sites, which has led to discussions on whether the sandbox filter really exists.

   On-page factors considered by Google

Now that we've examined off-page factors that have primary importance for Google, let's take a look at on-page factors that should be given attention before submitting to Google.

Google does not consider the META keyword tag for counting relevancy. While your META description tag contents can be used by Google as the description of your site in the search results, the META description does not have any influence for relevancy count.

Nowadays META tags don't influence website position in search results absolutely. They can be of use as additional information source about the Web page for surfers only. 

When targeting optimization for Google, be sure to use your keywords in the following:

• Your domain name - important!

• First words of the TITLE tag; HTML heading tags H1 to H6;

• ALT text as long as you also describe the image;

• Quality content on your index page. Try to make the length of your home page at least 300 words, however, don't hide anything from visitors' eyes (VERY IMPORTANT!).

• Link text for outgoing links.

• Drop-down form boxes created with the help of the SELECT tag.

• Finally, try to have some keywords in BOLD.

Additionally, try to center your pages around one central theme. Use synonyms of your important keyword phrases. Keep everything on the page on that ONE main topic, and provide good, solid content.

Pages that are optimized for Google will score best when there are at least a few links to outside sites that are related to your topic because this establishes your page's reputation as an authority. Google also measures how many websites outside your domain have links pointing to your site and factor in an "importance rating" for each of those referring sites. The more popular a site appears to a search engine, the higher up in the search listings they will place it.

According to Craig Silverstein with Google, "External links that you grant from a particular page on your website can become diluted. In other words, if you place 10,000 links to other Web pages from a particular page of your website, each link is less powerful than if you were to link to only five other Web pages. Or, the contribution value to another website of each individual link is weakened the more you grant."

   Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com)

You can submit your URL to Yahoo! Search for free here: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (note: you need to register at their portal first) and it will be indexed in about 1-2 months.

Yahoo! is still the most popular site on the Web, according to its traffic rank reported by Alexa (www.alexa.com). Nevertheless, in terms of the number of searches performed Google carries the day.

Yahoo! provides results in a number of ways. First, it has one of the most complete directories on the Web. There's also Yahoo! Search, which lists results in a way similar to other crawler-based engines. Here, in this section on crawler-based engines, we deal with the second service.

Sponsored results are found at the top, side, and bottom of the search results pages fed by Yahoo!. Yahoo! now owns its Yahoo! Search Marketing pay engine and provides search results to AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Lycos.

The search results at Yahoo! changed in February 2004. For the previous couple of years, Google was their search-results supplier. Nowadays, Yahoo! is using its own database. Yahoo! bought engines that had earlier pioneered the search world, Yahoo! Search officially provides all search engines acquired through these acquisitions with its own results. Therefore, when you optimize your Web pages for Yahoo!, there's a good chance of appearing in the top results of other popular search engines, such as AllTheWeb and AltaVista.

To rank well in Yahoo, you need to do the same things that help your rankings in Google. Off-page factors (link popularity, anchor text, etc.) are very important. Some experts consider it easier to rank well on Yahoo because your own internal links are more important and there also appears to be no requirement for link relevancy. Whereas Google claims that the PageRank of the relevant linking sites is worth more than the PageRank of irrelevant sites, links don't need to be relevant to do well on Yahoo.

Like all other search engines, they'll list you for free if you get links to your site. Much like Google, their crawler is very active and updates listings on a daily basis. However, it can take a few weeks for Yahoo to list new pages after they have found and crawled through referring links. The pages that have already been included in the listing are updated much more often, usually every several days.

In March 2004, Yahoo launched its paid inclusion program called Site Match. You can find out details about Yahoo's paid inclusion program here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php and the pricing here - http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse_pr.php?mkt=us

Site Match guarantees your site will appear in non-sponsored search results on Yahoo!, and other portals such as AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

Let's review some quick insights into the factors on your pages that will help you rank higher in Yahoo: use keywords in your domain name and use keywords in the TITLE tag. Your title must include your most important keyword phrase once toward the beginning of the tag. Don't split the important keyword phrase in your title!

META Keywords and META Description tags.

The Yahoo! family of search engines DOES NOT consider META tags when estimating relevancy. Use keywords in heading tags H1 through H6; Use keywords in link anchor text and ALT attributes of your images; the body main content and page names (URLs) need to have keywords in them too; the recommended keyword weight in the BODY tag for Yahoo is 5%, maximum 8%. A catalog page with lots of links, for instance a site map, will help a lot for your indexing and ranking by Yahoo!.

You can submit just the main page to Yahoo!, and let its spider find, crawl, and index the rest of your pages. If it doesn't find an important page, however, make sure you submit it manually.

Like with all of the other engines, solid and legitimate link popularity is considered important by Yahoo's spider as a ranking factor.

Yahoo! frowns upon having satellite sites that revolve around the theme of a main site. For example, if you sell office furniture and set up a main company site and then plant several satellite sites for each kind of furniture, it may seem suspicious to Yahoo!. Therefore, make sure that each site is a stand-alone site and serves a unique purpose, and that it's valuable to both the search engines and your users.

As with any other search engine it is vitally important for Yahoo! that you create valuable content for your search visitors.

   Windows Live Search (www.live.com)

You can submit your site to Live Search (formerly known as MSN Search) for free at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx, however they are sure to find it without your submission if you have links from sites already listed there.

MSN stands for Microsoft Network and was initially meant to be Microsoft's solution for Web search, among other goals. Nevertheless, it was powered by Inktomi's results and did not have its own crawler.

Since February 2005, MSN switched from another engine result base and introduced its own Web crawler. And their next significant step was on September 11, 2006 when Live Search release replaced MSN Search. For this moment Live Search is one of the most popular of world-class search engines, with around 11% of all search traffic. It definitely makes sense to target placement at the top of Live Search's listings as the amount of traffic you will receive as a result is considerable. However, with Live Search it's especially important to avoid spam methods since they claim to use a sophisticated series of technologies to fight against even potential spammers. PC magazine has published an article that states:

"Spammers are increasingly trying to weasel their way into search engine results, and Microsoft hopes that filtering them out can be one area where its tool can outshine Google's."
For more information on this article, visit http://www.pcmag.co.uk/news/1155758.

The information for finding the Live Search spider in your server visit logs is as follows: The Spider's name is MSNBot, with the IP addresses something like 65.55.xx.xx and 65.64.xx.xx, host msnbot.msn.com, and user agent "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)".

At this stage, the general rules of optimizing for Live Search would be similar to the optimization rules for other search engines. Get your site listed in the directories, obtain solid and quality link popularity, balance your keyword theme. You may also consider purchasing an ad from Live Search to get listed in the sponsored results. Live Search equally treats both off-page and on-page factors when ranking pages.

"The Power of Presence"..... Klick Twice Technologies..