A Down and Dirty
Guide to Search Engine Positioning
-- by Mark Joyner, http://www.aesop.com
-- http://www.redtienda.com/english/newsletter102.htm#1I've been asked
here to sum up what everyone should know about
search engine positioning.
First,
two caveats:
1) Search
Engine Positioning is only a tiny part of the big
Internet Marketing picture. It takes time and
there are other things that will pay off far more
in the long run.
2) This
is a gross simplification of the whole process.
With that
said, let's dive in.
1. This
discussion will focus on spider engines. That is,
an engine that goes to your site and indexes you
based on what it finds. Directories are a whole
'nother ball game (which we will address in
another article). Good examples of spiders are:
Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista.
2. Every
search engine is different. You need to learn the
"algorithm" (set of rules) used by each
engine to rank pages. An algorithm is a set of
rules.
3. These
algorithms change constantly. This is why tips
like "put 3 % of your target keyword in your
title tag" are probably worthless by the
time you hear them.
4. The
only reliable way to learn a sites algorithm is
to analyze actual results of a search on that
engine. This must be done using a reliable
keyword density analyzer. This tool will show you
the weight of particular keywords in high ranking
documents. You then simply reproduce this weight
in your document to attempt to reproduce the
results. Any advice you find that did not come
from an actual analysis is probably smoke and
mirrors. This method is very reliable. There are
a few other factors that will affect rank that
can not be measured this way (link popularity,
spam filtering etc.), but keyword density is the
easiest to measure and most reliable factor.
5. You
should not only be concerned with the rank of
your listing, but with the way it appears in the
engine as well. If your listing is #1, but looks
like a bunch of junk (try a search right now and
you'll see what I mean), it will be a waste of
your time. The appearance of your listing depends
on two of three things:
a) your
title tag e.g.
b) your
description tag (applies to some engines - all
others use the following)
c) the
first 250 words (or so) of visible text on your
site on your site
"A"
above is what the engine links to your page. B or
C are used as descriptive text for your link. You
must balance your work on these tags. That is,
sometimes what gets you a high rank will not make
for an enticing listing. Remember that your title
is most important. Think of it as a headline for
an ad.
6. No
software in itself is going to get you a high
position on a search engine. Period. There are
many software products claiming to get you a
higher position on the web. For the most part,
save your money. There are really only two
programs you need (and you may not even need
them):
a) A
keyword density analyzer. You don't really need
this if you have some other tool that will allow
you to analyze the relative mathematical
composition of any text. If what I just said flew
over your head, a keyword density analyzer is for
you.
b) A site
submitter. You don't really need one of these,
either, if you are strictly focusing on a high
position in the spider engines. You can probably
submit these pages one by one just as easily
since the process of gaining a high rank is a
surgical one. However, if you need to submit many
pages at once (if you do it will save time), or
you want to submit to other types of sites (most
submitters submit to over 900 sites and spider
engines account for about 12 of those), then it
is a good idea to get some software that will
automate this task for you. We've developed a
powerful multi-use tool that will spider all of
your pages and submit each of them to all known
spider engines (it has about 20 other functions
as well - all of them key).
There is,
of course, much more to it than I have listed
here, but this information will get you started
on the right track.
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