Search
Engine Positioning- "Text Selection and optimization"
This is the key to good
search engine ranking, and the key to delivering an effective web site -
'web copy'. Search engines look at descriptive text over everything else
when ranking or positioning your web pages amongst others in the same
category. Sites that are predominantly 'image' based do less well with
search engines than those that are text and content rich. Sites that
deliver their information from within Flash and Java do less well than
those having pages constructed with HTML text. Sites that use ASP and
dynamically generated pages do less well at search engine ranking, or at
least have a more difficult time achieving good search positions than
those that use static HTML pages. Consider this carefully when looking
at your site. Are your pages ASP or CGI (do they end in extensions
.asp?) If so you may need to construct static HTML pages and place them
strategically within your site (more later).
Search engines need to be
fed information so that they can categorize your pages and rank them.
They look for information within the Meta area, comment tags, alt-image
attributes, heading and title tags, hyperlink text and hyperlink URL
text, but all of the above factor less when ranking your site than 'body
text'. Will presenting lots of descriptive text guarantee a good
placement? No. The problem arises in that the various search engines
have their own preferences for the amount of text that should appear on
the page, and the position and frequency of keywords within that text.
For example AltaVista seems to favor
a word count in the 700 word region, whereas Excite
might prefer a word count of only 400 words per page. Each have their
own preference for frequency and prominence, which makes life somewhat
more difficult. Assuming that your web site contains sufficient pages,
and that all your page text is varied in terms of word count and
keywords etc, you should have a good chance of hitting the 'sweet spot'
and ranking high on one or more search engines. Assuming that you do
not, then you have to dig deeper into the bowls of "search engine
optimization" and apply more in-depth and demanding strategies to
your pages. The first thing to do is acquire software that can help you
analyze competitor pages to find out just what they are doing. Start by
going to your targeted search engine and enter your product keyword or
phrase. Analyze the top 10 pages or so. Analyze the word count on each page and take an
average. If you know what the optimum word count is for your chosen
search engine, then move your page word-count a little closer to that optimum
word count. Look carefully at the Meta area, alt-image attributes,
hyperlink text, Title and Headings, comment text etc. try to emulate the
same words and positions without copying. You will almost certainly have
some text on your pages in common with the text on their pages, but some
of your words will be different, so you need to superimpose your words
within the above areas in place of their words. Try to keep the same
relative positions for the important words. For example, if you have
used the term "search ranking" and you see those two words at
the start of the Title tag on a high ranking page, then use them in your Title tag. This is not
plagiarism as both your sites are about the same subject therefore it
stands to reason that your page titles would be similar. Do not try and
copy the whole page, changing images to look like your site. Doing this
could infringe on copyrights and get you into deep water. We know of one
particular SEO company who recently tried this approach, were caught red
handed and are paying the penalty.
Once you have analyzed
the key areas of the page and emulated high ranking pages from your
competitor sites, you must monitor the progress of your page closely.
You will probably not see it jump in at the #1 position on your targeted
search engines. The reason is simple - search engines factor other
elements into their page ranking algorithms such as 'link
popularity'
and the overall theme of the site. You cannot easily emulate someone's
link popularity or overall theme, so you will not have a page that
'exactly' matches all the desired ranking criteria
and you will need to fine tune it.
Next Stage - Meta
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