Nick Bowen's News & Articles
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| Some Tips for Search Engine Optimization | ||
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Paying for the top position rarely works - the most popular search engine doesn’t allow it, and users ignore the paid-for listings anyway (just like they ignore banner ads). The most important ranking criterion on almost all modern search engines is the number of in-bound links an individual page has from the rest of the internet. Getting such links is the most powerful single thing you can do to optimize your position. Search engines rank individual pages, not whole sites — because users typically want to know about the information on pages, rather than about the organisation which owns them. Forcing users to enter your site through a Macromedia Flash Animation is currently the best tactic we know of to ensure that the rest of your site will not feature in search engine results. You don’t appear in any search results at all unless your page contains the words and phrases that people actually search for. Beautiful graphics and stunning animations usually reduce your search engine ranking! Matching users’ search phrases is much more effective than matching individual words, because you will be included in a smaller result set and, hence, be more likely to appear on the first page. Massive lists of repetitive keywords don’t work — search engines use natural language syntax checking and frequency analysis to eliminate such pages from consideration. Multiple synonyms for the same word or concept dramatically increase your chance of appearing in a small result set — no one uses the identical phrase for a concept, every time they employ it. Meta tag keywords don’t really work — they merely compensate for an invisible web site design with no matching words on it. Keywords and phrases are often worth more if they appear at the top of a page. Preventing users from exiting your site through external links will almost always reduce your position in search engine rankings — search engines aim to map the internet, so they reward sites that tell them about new, unexplored parts of the web. Using large amounts of specialist or technical language which is known to potential customers, significantly increases your chances of appearing in their search results. Using jargon which is unknown to, or unused by, customers has the opposite effect. Puttting key words and phrases in HTML title tags usually increases their value. Building a massively complex site with many layers is a really good way of reducing the search engine position of web pages lower down the hierarchy. Putting key words and phrases in HTML link ‘anchors’ can improve the value of those links. Linking to a page using scripting JavaScript or ASP/VBScript links is guaranteed to render it invisible — poor programmers often let their software put rubbish like this into their code. Key words and phrases in a web page’s URL are favoured by some search engine ranking algorithms. Serving up web pages as Microsoft ActiveX controls is a very successful way of rendering them invisible. All other things being equal, a page with greater keyword density will rank higher than similar pages. Published By http://consulting.gbdirect.co.uk |
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