What factors most influence search engine ranking?
When I talk about search engine ranking, and how to influence or predict it, I am going by the knowledge gained over time from reading the opinions of so-called "experts", as well as noticing the cause and effect of the web pages on my sites. Obviously any discussion of what characteristics of a web page is looked upon favorably by a specific search engine is often only an educated guess.
Considering the above, and considering the fact that search engine algorithms change frequently, I recommend that you construct your web pages to be primarily useful for human visitors first, and then additionally use common sense in determining structure that would logically be looked upon favorably by the search engines.
With that in mind, it seems that search engine ranking can be influenced by three primary things:
1. on-page content (over which you have complete control)
2. incoming links from external pages (over which you have partial control)
3. off-page content (over which you have little control)
ON PAGE CONTENT:
Again, put the words on the page so that your visitors enjoy the experience of visiting your site, that should be your primary goal.
But then again, if your page isn't found, of what value is an enjoyable page? So therefore ....
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to ensure that the search engines understand what your web site and pages are all about, and to appreciate the value available to someone searching for the topic you've written about.
Considering the fact that a spider can only read text, and a search engine algorithm basically can only do mathematical calculations on the text the spider has found, sometimes they need some help in understanding your page.
Since your page is normally focused on a primary keyword phrase, and perhaps 1-4 secondary keywords, make sure they understand what you're talking about. Some ways you can do that with on-page content are:
1. the right most part of your URL can and should contain the primary keyword phrase that your page is focused on. If your page is about custom made widgets, there is no reason that the page cannot be named http://www.domain-name.com/custom-made-widgets.html, is there?
2. limit each page's content to a primary keyword phrase, 1-4 secondary keyword phrases, and close variants (such as singular or plural versions of the keyword, the word ending in -ing, etc.).
3. the meta description tag should be used to describe what your page is about. Write it for human consumption because it will often display in the search result, which will give the searcher the ability to decide whether to click on the link or not.
4. meta keywords are not commonly used anymore, but can be useful for keyword variations and misspellings. You don't want to put misspelled words on your page, but you do want to pick up the occasional surfer who searches for the misspelled phrase. You can also include synonyms in your meta keyword list, it might help a bit for some search engines.
5. the page title is one of the most important parts of SEO, and probably the most crucial components of on-page content that can make or break your SEO efforts.
The title tag should include the primary keyword phrase at the very left and read well for human consumption. It can also include secondary keywords if they can be inserted in the title without affecting readability.
6. the heading tags, H1, H2, H3, etc. can help the spider understand the primary and secondary topics you're talking about. Wrap a single main heading containing your primary keyword phrase between title and /title tags, and the secondary keywords can be between H2 tags (you can have multiple H2 and H3 sets, but should only have a single H1.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
In looking at a page of one of my sites that is targeting the keyphrase "Harley jacket", at the moment I'm ranked #6 of 299,000. I've done the correct on page tasks, which is to put "Harley jacket" in the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, H1 heading tag, and on my page a few times. I also link to this page from other related pages on my site (pages that are optimized for other Harley items).
In spot #18 (2nd page) is another page that also done the obvious, but beats my page rank (I currently show a PR0 on the Google toolbar, with no backlinks. Not good but more on that later). The #18 page has a PR4 with 5 backlinks. It would seem that they should rank ahead of my page, since they beat me in the off page area.
One thing I see is in my title I include the phrase "Harley jacket". On their page (use the view source on your browser to see what their HTML looks like) they say "leather jacket with Harley-Davidson patches", not quite as targeted to the phrase I'm searching. Of course they rise to the top when someone searches for "leather jacket with harley patches" and do better than I do when someone types "Harley Davidson jacket", since I don't have Davidson in my page at all.
Hmmm, something to look at, I'd say, glad I noticed that.
The point is, you can still do well before reaching a good PR and a good number of inbound links. The thing is, PR is a bit evasive. You can only see the PR that the Google toolbar reports, which isn't updated as often as pages are indexed. But I guarantee, Google has record of a real PR value for my page, and the fact that I do have inbound backlinks, even though they don't all show (the competition probably has more than the 5 Google reports also, for that matter).
My page is relatively new, so the external manifestation of those numbers aren't shown yet on the toolbar. I suspect my real PR on that page is definitely more than PR0, but probably is less than PR4, though, so the competing page still beats me in off-page content, I beat it for on-page "Harley jackets", it beats me for "Harley Davidson jacket" (at least until I change my page to include that word).
As you can perhaps see, SEO is an acquirable skill which you can learn and be successful at if you take the time, and use common sense. Or you can pay someone big bucks to do it for you. If you only care about getting a high ranking for a few phrases, that's one thing. But if you have thousands of pages, each targeting a different keyword phrase, you need to get the key concepts ingrained in your mind before you start writing content. Otherwise you're simply wasting your time and future income.
This discussion also points out the super importance of determining what keywords you want to do well for, for a given page. When I wrote the page, I thought I was wanting to do well for Harley jackets, and I am. Now that I check out the results and the competition, I see that they want to do well for Harley Davidson jacket, and after using one of my keyword research tools, I find out that searchers look more frequently for Harley Davidson jacket than they look for Harley jacket, so I'll have to make a change, won't I? SEO can be an unending challenge. Hopefully the change I make won't ruin my Harley jacket ranking at the same time as it improves my Harley Davidson jacket result.
In future discussions we'll talk more about anchor text (which is off page content), getting inbound links, and we'll get more in-depth about some on-page content we didn't fully cover today.
See you soon!
Considering the above, and considering the fact that search engine algorithms change frequently, I recommend that you construct your web pages to be primarily useful for human visitors first, and then additionally use common sense in determining structure that would logically be looked upon favorably by the search engines.
With that in mind, it seems that search engine ranking can be influenced by three primary things:
1. on-page content (over which you have complete control)
2. incoming links from external pages (over which you have partial control)
3. off-page content (over which you have little control)
ON PAGE CONTENT:
Again, put the words on the page so that your visitors enjoy the experience of visiting your site, that should be your primary goal.
But then again, if your page isn't found, of what value is an enjoyable page? So therefore ....
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to ensure that the search engines understand what your web site and pages are all about, and to appreciate the value available to someone searching for the topic you've written about.
Considering the fact that a spider can only read text, and a search engine algorithm basically can only do mathematical calculations on the text the spider has found, sometimes they need some help in understanding your page.
Since your page is normally focused on a primary keyword phrase, and perhaps 1-4 secondary keywords, make sure they understand what you're talking about. Some ways you can do that with on-page content are:
1. the right most part of your URL can and should contain the primary keyword phrase that your page is focused on. If your page is about custom made widgets, there is no reason that the page cannot be named http://www.domain-name.com/custom-made-widgets.html, is there?
2. limit each page's content to a primary keyword phrase, 1-4 secondary keyword phrases, and close variants (such as singular or plural versions of the keyword, the word ending in -ing, etc.).
3. the meta description tag should be used to describe what your page is about. Write it for human consumption because it will often display in the search result, which will give the searcher the ability to decide whether to click on the link or not.
4. meta keywords are not commonly used anymore, but can be useful for keyword variations and misspellings. You don't want to put misspelled words on your page, but you do want to pick up the occasional surfer who searches for the misspelled phrase. You can also include synonyms in your meta keyword list, it might help a bit for some search engines.
5. the page title is one of the most important parts of SEO, and probably the most crucial components of on-page content that can make or break your SEO efforts.
The title tag should include the primary keyword phrase at the very left and read well for human consumption. It can also include secondary keywords if they can be inserted in the title without affecting readability.
6. the heading tags, H1, H2, H3, etc. can help the spider understand the primary and secondary topics you're talking about. Wrap a single main heading containing your primary keyword phrase between title and /title tags, and the secondary keywords can be between H2 tags (you can have multiple H2 and H3 sets, but should only have a single H1.
PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
In looking at a page of one of my sites that is targeting the keyphrase "Harley jacket", at the moment I'm ranked #6 of 299,000. I've done the correct on page tasks, which is to put "Harley jacket" in the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, H1 heading tag, and on my page a few times. I also link to this page from other related pages on my site (pages that are optimized for other Harley items).
In spot #18 (2nd page) is another page that also done the obvious, but beats my page rank (I currently show a PR0 on the Google toolbar, with no backlinks. Not good but more on that later). The #18 page has a PR4 with 5 backlinks. It would seem that they should rank ahead of my page, since they beat me in the off page area.
One thing I see is in my title I include the phrase "Harley jacket". On their page (use the view source on your browser to see what their HTML looks like) they say "leather jacket with Harley-Davidson patches", not quite as targeted to the phrase I'm searching. Of course they rise to the top when someone searches for "leather jacket with harley patches" and do better than I do when someone types "Harley Davidson jacket", since I don't have Davidson in my page at all.
Hmmm, something to look at, I'd say, glad I noticed that.
The point is, you can still do well before reaching a good PR and a good number of inbound links. The thing is, PR is a bit evasive. You can only see the PR that the Google toolbar reports, which isn't updated as often as pages are indexed. But I guarantee, Google has record of a real PR value for my page, and the fact that I do have inbound backlinks, even though they don't all show (the competition probably has more than the 5 Google reports also, for that matter).
My page is relatively new, so the external manifestation of those numbers aren't shown yet on the toolbar. I suspect my real PR on that page is definitely more than PR0, but probably is less than PR4, though, so the competing page still beats me in off-page content, I beat it for on-page "Harley jackets", it beats me for "Harley Davidson jacket" (at least until I change my page to include that word).
As you can perhaps see, SEO is an acquirable skill which you can learn and be successful at if you take the time, and use common sense. Or you can pay someone big bucks to do it for you. If you only care about getting a high ranking for a few phrases, that's one thing. But if you have thousands of pages, each targeting a different keyword phrase, you need to get the key concepts ingrained in your mind before you start writing content. Otherwise you're simply wasting your time and future income.
This discussion also points out the super importance of determining what keywords you want to do well for, for a given page. When I wrote the page, I thought I was wanting to do well for Harley jackets, and I am. Now that I check out the results and the competition, I see that they want to do well for Harley Davidson jacket, and after using one of my keyword research tools, I find out that searchers look more frequently for Harley Davidson jacket than they look for Harley jacket, so I'll have to make a change, won't I? SEO can be an unending challenge. Hopefully the change I make won't ruin my Harley jacket ranking at the same time as it improves my Harley Davidson jacket result.
In future discussions we'll talk more about anchor text (which is off page content), getting inbound links, and we'll get more in-depth about some on-page content we didn't fully cover today.
See you soon!
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