Search engines are constantly changing and refining
the methods they use to determine relevancy and page
ranking. They do not, for obvious reasons, make public
the details of these complex algorythms, but
below is a list of factors that, without doubt, are the
most important criteria;
-
Inbound links -
Google's latest thinking is based around the idea
that one of the best judges of a popular, relevant
website is how many other sites link to it. Getting
links from other websites to your own is crucial
to building up your ranking success.
However,
links from any old websites will not do. Google assesses
both the relevance and the individual page ranking
of every web page that links to your own. If the
linking page has a low page rank itself, or is not
relevant to your site, Google is not likely to take
it into account.
- Relevant
page content - search engines are increasingly
clever at analysing the relevancy of the copy, including
page titles, on each web page. Lack of content -
say less than 150 words on a page - will generally
result in a lower page ranking.
- Location and frequency
of
"key phrases" on each
page. When someone types in a search phrase to a
search engine - i.e. "shoe shops, Lincoln", the search
engine will try to find pages that match the relevancy
of the search phrase in their page copy. So you need
to decide which search phrases you're interested
in and weave these "key phrases" into your
copy frequently (but not over-frequently for fear
of being marked down for spamming!)
These key phrases need to be repeated
in key areas of the page i.e. in properly marked
up page titles and in other metatags
- Page construction and
elements on a page - incorrectly structured, images,
tables, javascript and many other elements can make
life harder for the spiders to crawl the page. Use
of frames in pages can still be an issue for some engines
- Meta tags - these invisible pieces
of information inserted into the "head"
area of your web pages, though less relevant to
search engines these days, can still sometimes
help produce better rankings and should not be
ignored.
- Avoiding overuse of images and
Flash content
which can make for slower page download times and can
interrupt spiders crawling the site
- Inclusion of a site
map to help search engine spiders "crawl" and index
the site more easily
This is not an exhaustive list of factors - for instance,
Google definitely seems to rank websites
higher the longer they have been in existance - but
they are key current factors that you can have some control
over and which make the most difference.
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0117 950 8053 or 0774 775 3764 to find out more or email
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