If you follow the trade press and other experts, and there is a great deal of material, you will find that three items combine to most assure that search engines will discern the keywords you want applied to a page. These elements are the page title, the text on the page, and the text of the link going to that page. These are the BIG THREE, the eHoly Trinity of search engine Optimization.
The title is a standard tag found in the head section of an html - or web page - file. This text can be read in the window frame for the internet browser and is also displayed as the link name in search engine results.
The text can be displayed within a large variety of tags within the body section of the html file. It is important that there be text one way or another, sites with emphasis on design may render text into images, and in this case alternatives must be found to make the text accessible to the search engines.
The link text is the most often overlooked of the BIG THREE. How often do you still see the words click here? Most search engine ranking algorithms follow a logic which equates link text with actual content. In other words if the link says click here the search engine believes the page is about clicking here, but if the link says Benny Hinn Ministries - from Living Word, then, as far as the search engines are concerned, the page probably has something to do with - you guessed it, Living Word and Benny Hinn Ministries.
Below you will find additional examples. Remember that sometimes the title will contain more than just the keywords pages and the target audience, you are targetting. These examples show how title, text and link text have been so ordered to indicate the content of theat least in search terms.
- Advertising Specialties for Event Planning Needs
- Options in Federal Government Contracts
- Galleon Jewelers: Your Nautical, Marine & Gold Dolphin Jewelery Connection
One other important aspect of search engine success is your link strategy - or how you get other sites to link to your site. Links from other sites to your site are important in the first place for discovery, secondly for relevance, and finally for importance - three terms used widely in the discussion of search engine ranking.
The aggregate inbound links from other sites are key indicators, at least to search engines, of how important your site is. You may have the best information available on office furniture in Washington DC but unless other sites link to yours, the search engines will make the determination that your site is unimportant. All other things being equal, search engines will rank your more important competitors pages ahead of yours. Fortunately, there are a number of ways the search engines themselves can help with inbound links.
An Internet Marketing Case Study of the work completed for our first and longest running customer Exquisite Surfaces gives more examples.
Discovery is the process by which search engines find new pages. The search engines use robot web crawlers which go out periodically to all the pages the search engine already knows about (frequency based on importance!) and collects the latest information on that page (since pages change over time). Among other items they collect are the links on the page. The links are compared to the list of known pages and any unknown pages are put into another queue (based on the importance of the referring page!) to be crawled by the robot.
How relevant is any given page to the requested search? Relevance really ties together all the strands of search engine optimization work. A page is relevant if the link text indicates other sites label it as relevant, if it is important (i.e. trusted), and if the page title and text indicate the page has contents specifically about those keywords.
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