COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT SEARCH ENGINES
Search Engine Optimization – A Quick Guide
When designing your web site, you will need to consider using some form of search engine optimization, or SEO, to try to ensure that your site ranks highly in the lists produced by the major search engines. This is important, as it is well-known that the patience of web users is not unlimited, to say the least, and most people who search the Internet lose interest after the first couple of pages of results.
Arguably the first step involved in SEO should be deciding on which keyword combination you should be using. There are several tools available to help in this; Google Adwords and Yahoo Overture are the obvious choices here, though there are others. You should also be looking to see what keywords your competitors are using. You may not want to use any of these words, but it may give you some ideas on the direction you should be taking.
Why Does My Google PageRank Matter?
PageRank is one of the many methods used by Google to help determine the importance of a web page.
In simple terms Google describes PageRank as a method for determining the value of a web page by the value of web pages to which it is linked. In other words, a link from web page A to web page B is considered as a vote by page A for page B. However, Google does not just look at the number of links that a web page receives; it also looks at the PageRank of those pages. A link from a web page with a high PageRank is considered to have more value than a link from a web page with a low PageRank.
The value of a web page can be between 0, the lowest value, and 10. However, this is not a simple linear progression, but rather some form of logarithmic progression – it takes more links, or links of a higher quality, to move from PageRank 6 to 7, than it does to move from 1 to 2. Google don’t state exactly how their scale works, but let’s assume that is actually logarithmic. If so, then for example if it takes 10 links to move from PageRank 0 to 1, it would take 100 links to move from 1 to 2, and 1000 links to move from 2 to 3. This assumes of course that all links are of equal value.
How Do I to Use Keywords?
When a search engine indexes a web page, one of the factors that is considered are the keywords. These keywords are used by the search engine to help determine the content of the site, and to rank the relevancy of the site to the search terms entered by a user. For example, let’s say that you own a store that sells model airplanes in Savannah, Georgia. When designing a web site, your keywords might be some combination of “model airplanes” and “Savannah” or “Savannah, Georgia”. If the site is designed using these keywords, both in the HTML tags and in the actual page content, then a user looking for model airplanes stores in Georgia would see your site near the top of the rankings. So, how and where should these keywords be used?
The first place that the keywords need to be used is in the title of the web page. The title bar is the text that is displayed at the top of the browser window. It is also used as a page title in the rankings produced by many search engines, and as the wording used if a user bookmarks a page. The title used should be no longer than about 70 characters, be readable and contain your keywords. Using the example above, the title may simply read “ABC Model Airplane Store, Savannah”, (ABC referring to the name of the store here). Alternatively, if you consider the location to be less important – maybe you’re targeting Internet customers – it may be something like “Buy Model Airplanes Here”. Keep it simple – don’t try to jazz up the title, anything like that will either be ignored, or the page may be downgraded if it is checked by a human.
Next, the keywords should be used in the meta tags. There are two meta tags that need to be considered, the “description” tag and the “keywords” tag. The first of these should contain a brief description of the web page and its content. There is a maximum size here of 250 characters. Make sure that it is readable, that it contains your keywords, and that your keywords appear near the start of the description. Using our example above, the description for the home page may start by saying “ABC Model Airplane Shop of Savannah stocks a full range of model airplane kits from….” and then continue by listing some of the major brands carried in the store. Don’t just produce a list of keywords - the search engines will reject the page if it is though to be using keyword spamming.
Three Free Ways to Get Quality Links
One method is to submit your web site to one of the hundreds of web directories that are available. Many of these are ranked highly by Google, and getting listed in such a directory will enhance your PageRank. Submission to most directories is free, though some will require a link back to the directory in return for listing your web site.
Web sites of all types are looking for articles in their field of interest, whether it’s archeology or zoology, bell-ringing or yachting. There are also many web sites that have banks of articles, on all subjects. Why not use your knowledge of the subject to write articles about it, and submit the article to web masters looking for relevant content. Try to make such an article interesting, rather than self-promoting – you are not looking to promote your web site in the actual text of the article. You do this in your signature file, which web masters will include at the end of the article. In the signature file, make sure that you include a link to your web site, plus a few words about it. The link will help in two ways, not only in PageRank, but also potentially increasing traffic to your site - people that find your article useful may click on your link for more information. Good articles are often picked up for reproduction at other web sites, increasing your exposure. This is allowed, as long as the content is unchanged and, more importantly for you, the signature file is left intact. Write enough articles and, if they are of good quality, you may appear to be an expert in that field and people will start looking for you by name.
This neatly brings me to the third method of adding links to your web site, although it’s not really necessary to be regarded as an expert for this – it just helps give you some credibility. Message boards, or forums, are all over the Internet, dealing with almost every subject under the sun.
The Importance of Links in SEO
Although Google looks at many factors when ranking web pages, the single most important factor currently seems to be the number and type of in-bound links to that page. Please note I mention “type” here – as we shall see, the page from which the link comes can make a big difference in where a web page appears in the search engine rankings.
Link popularity first became important with the rise of Google and its PageRank system of ranking web pages, although some search engines had used link popularity as a factor in their rankings before this. Put very simply, Google’s PageRank, and other similar search engine algorithms, assumes that a web page that is linked from another web page is more relevant than a web page with no other page linked to it, and so will rank that first web page higher than the second one. The belief was that the more pages that were linked to a particular page, the more relevance that page had.
How Do I Know How Visitor's The Site Gets?
Most web hosting companies offer a variety of reports that show a number of things. Apart from the actual number of visitors to the site, you will also be able to see how many different pages they looked at and how long they spent looking at a particular page. The reports should also show from where the visitor arrived, which may help you to see how you rank in various search engines. It can also show you where dead links are within your site, making site-maintenance easier for you. Another free tool to use is Google Analytics.
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