Factors that influence the position of your site in search results
Part 1 - KeywordsIn this article I will list major factors that influence your site's position in search results. These factors may be positive or negative. The first part of the article will deal with keywords. Part 2 (coming soon) will deal with various kinds of links, part 3 - with actual content, text, use of images, frames, flash, etc.
Keywords - General info:
One of the most important on-page optimization techniques is the Keywords Optimization. When internet users search the internet they look for specific words and phrases. So, you need to define relevant keywords and key phrases for your site content to enable the users to find your site. Search engines become more and more sophisticated and, for example, if you use word "map" as one of your keywords, the search engines will consider "maps," "mapped," "mapping" etc. as possible search words.
If you site is in English, it's also recommended to optimize it for your keywords synonyms (although in other languages Google won't recognize them as synonyms and won't take them into account in the calculation of your site rank and keywords relevance.
If a search engine concludes that your webpage is "stuffed" with keywords (keywords density is 9% or higher), your site may be banned from these search engines.
Keywords in -title- tag
This tag is considered to be the most important one. The -title- tag text shows in search results and the keywords that appear in this tag have considerable weight for Google SE. -Title- tag shouldn't include more than 60 symbols. It should make perfect sense (i.e. should be a coherent sentence that include your main keywords).
Keywords density
The density of your web-pages keywords should be around 3-6% for main keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Density of 9% and higher may seem suspicious to search engines as it looks more like keyword stuffing. Remember, you target a human audience and search engines become more and more capable of differentiating between coherent texts and mechanically stuffed lists of keywords.
Keywords in Domain Name and Page URL's
It's important to have 1-3 keywords in URL's. It's a good practice to give your internal web-pages meaningful titles. For example a site in the travel field, that, among others, offers airline tickets booking, will call the corresponding page: www.travel-window.com/Main_Categories/flights_local_international.htm . Besides the word "travel" in its domain name, it also has three keywords in its page URL: local and international flights.
Keywords position on the page
It's important to situate the text that includes most of your main keywords close to the beginning of your web-page.
Tags -strong-,-b- and -alt-
It's important to add an -alt- tag to the images (of course this tag should include some keywords). -Strong- and -b- tags are less important, but they still need to be considered.
Keywords in anchor text
It's very important that keywords appear in the anchor text of inbound links (anchor text – text to which a link is assigned, inbound link – a link from another website to your site).
Meta tags keywords
Main meta tags include: keywords, content, description and some others. In the past it was crucially important to have your major keywords included in these meta tags. However, now the influence of the meta tags content on search results is very questionable. However, it's better to consider this factor, too (it won't hurt but may help).
Keywords proximity
It's recommended to distribute the keywords more or less evenly throughout the text of your webpage.
to be continued
posted by Bizi South Africa @ 6:19 PM
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