Mark Hammond has had years of experience writing articles for the search engine industry. He now joins the 1st Place Design team where is able to access inside knowledge on the workings of one of Australia's most successful search marketing companies.
It is a well-known fact in the SEM world today that every search engine has its own set of pre-defined criteria for ranking web pages. These criteria, a combination of patented secrets and popular knowledge, are the primary factors which decide the algorithm of a search engine.
It is a well-known fact in the SEM world today that every search engine has its own set of pre-defined criteria for ranking web pages. These criteria, a combination of patented secrets and popular knowledge, are the primary factors which decide the algorithm of a search engine. Each factor gives certain points to each page and ultimately all the points are added up by the search engine to give you the page’s rank. Now, to optimize your site better you need to learn more about the “secret” part of the algorithm, which search engine companies, obviously, want to hide from their competitors as well as SEO firms.
In the last paragraph, you might have noticed that I mentioned about search engines ranking “web pages”, and not “web sites”. Essentially, this means that optimizing your landing page for various keywords would not get you higher ranks. But if you optimize each web page for just one of these keywords, different pages of your website will be displayed on higher positions on the listings, even for the other keywords! To increase the relevance of your page for a certain keyword, ensure that you mention the keyword either in the domain name, the URL or at least some page of your site.
It is important that you keep your focus for optimization not just for attracting more visitors, but also for making your web pages more readable and detectable for the search engine crawlers. Looking through the eye of a crawler makes the optimization process a lot easier and more effective. Like, it would help you to know that the part of your webpage which first grabs the attention of your readers widely differs from the part that a crawler scans first. Readers are known to read the main section of a page first, whereas a search engine crawler reads the left-hand pane menu first, instead of main content, as it is closer to the code’s starting point. Also, remember that a crawler ‘guesses’ the theme of your website and also the words that describe it justifiably, just by reading the page’s HTML code. After this, the crawler compresses the particular page and creates a related index, which enlists the important words on that page, along with the parameters (frequency, proximity etc.) associated with each word.
It would also help to pay attention to the “ALT” attribute used in a page’s HTML code, which was originally used for displaying alternative text corresponding to an image if the image itself could not be displayed. But these days, the attribute is being used for an additional purpose of informing a crawler about your page’s content. This works better than using graphics and flash animations that are meant solely to delight viewers and has no effect on the crawler in terms of increasing your page’s relevancy. Also, do not overload the “HEAD” portion of your web page with unnecessary elements like styles and scripts. This is because all crawlers have an upper limit on loading web page content and after this limit all the keywords that you use become invisible to the crawlers.
It is true that you need to work towards pleasing crawlers to get higher visibility, but don’t forget your site’s visitors and customers, for they are the ones who your site is meant for. Always remember, it is the people first, and then the search engine.