WebMarketingAdvantage.com | Tuning Your Pages

Friday, October 9, 2009

Search Engine Position

Everyone wants her site to be on page one of Google for all the search terms important to their business. Of course, that first page has just ten sites, so there is a lot of competition for that great position. Just how can you get there? What's the secret of success?

The Basics

Last week's issue explained what search engines are trying to do--to show relevant results in response to a query. If you missed that issue, click here to read it.

If the search engines had people to read sites and rank them, then all that we'd have to do is make our sites quite relevant to the queries of interest, and the human reviewers would make that judgment, and we'd be done. However, there are too many sites for people to review, so the search engines use computer programs to do the review. So we can figure out what those programs do, and set up our pages to get favorable results by ranking well with the programs.

But let's pause for a moment. The goal of those programs is deliver judgments similar to those that a human being would give, and they keep getting better at doing that. So we have to be careful to use methods that work well with the computer programs, that a human being would also consider contribute to relevance. In that way, we won't use a technique that works for today but then gets us penalized for bad behavior as the programs get better.

OK, now let's look at the basic areas to address. An earlier issue talked about how the domain name can help you; if you missed it click here to read it.

What we'll do is choose one or two relevant search queries for each important page on the site, and make those pages relevant for those terms.

Meta Tags

The pages of your site are written in html, a markup language that tells the browser how to display the pages. Within that html are a number of meta tags that are used in various ways. Of course the search engines see these meta tags, and they use them as part of their assessment of relevance.

The most important meta tag is the title tag. It's displayed at the very top of the page, in the colored border of the browser page. You may not even notice it. But that tag is very important to Google as a clue to what the page is about. You should begin the title tag with the important keyword, and use it a second time in the title tag if you can. For example, for shoes you might try: "Shoes: Jones on Main for The Finest Shoes"

This is an important step you can take to improve search engine rank for specific terms.

There is also a keyword tag and a description tag. The keyword tag is of limited importance to search engines, but go ahead and use it for the terms that are used on the page that you want to emphasize. No more than three or four terms. The description tag is sometimes the summary that the search engine displays in your listing. So write a custom description for each page, emphasizing the theme of the page and including those key words.

Word Usage

The search engines look for patterns of word usage in the text on your pages in order to tell what the pages are about. The theory is that if a word is important to the content, then you'll use that word early in the first paragraph, you'll use it a few times in the text, and you'll use it near the end of the text.

Don't overdo it; four, five or six usages are enough. And spread them through 200 words or so of narrative. You'll notice when you do this that if your narrative is really about a subject, you won't have any trouble mentioning that subject four or five times in the narrative. So the programmed relevance estimate is really a pretty accurate measure in this case!

Headings

Your pages have headings and sub-headings. If these are images, then the search engine can't read them. But if they are shown as text, the search engine can use your titles as a good indication of what the page is about!

To test which you have, hold down the button on your mouse and drag it across the heading. If you see the cursor move character by character, then the title is text. But if it jumps across the entire heading, it's an image, and the Webmaster should change it.

It's best if the most important headings are within If you know me, you know that I use tools for as much of my work as possible. I have limited time to g<h1> tags and the next most important within <h2> tags. Tell your Webmaster to do that, it's not hard.

Headings are an important cue to topics for search engines. Be sure that the search engines can read them!