Search Engine Ranking Statistics
What The Search Engines Want (Part 1)
By Brent Winters
Originally Published: September 2004
Have you ever done a search and wondered how your competitors are appearing at the top of the results and why you are not? If so, you've taken the first crucial step into the intriguing world of Search Engine Optimization. An active curiosity will definitely serve you well in this field, paying huge dividends as you discover what makes each search engine tick.
The key factor to building a top-ranking page is to know what a search engine is looking for to determine each page's search position. Each engine is different, having its own unique set of preferences. Those in the business call this the search engine's "ranking algorithm."
Study Top Ranked Pages
So how do you know what each engine prefers to see? Start out by studying the pages that already rank near the top of the search results for the keywords you are targeting. What elements do the majority of these pages share in common? How are these pages different than the ones that appear further down the list? Don't look at the finished page in all its "graphical glory." Instead, view the HTML source code for each page. While it's not pretty to look at, this is what the search engine actually sees.
In your study, you might notice that the majority of the top-ranking pages contain the keyword in the page title. If you saw this, you could then reasonably deduce that the engine you're examining has a preference toward seeing the keyword in the title tag. Therefore, ensuring your pages also contain your best keywords in the title tag would move you one step closer to your goal.
Gone are the days of being able to propel your page to the top of the search results by simply changing one or two elements of your page. Today, you need to work on off-page factors like link popularity combined with on-page factors. To optimize on-page factors, you must ensure your page has similar elements in the HTML source code to other top ranking pages.
Each Search Engine Favors Certain Statistical Elements
Am I saying that you should copy the content of your competitor's Web page and make it your own? Of course not. Rather than mimicking the actual wording of other top ranking pages, you should be trying to mimic the key statistical elements that the engine cares about. The closer that your page's statistics match what the search engine wants to see, the better chance you have of ranking highly.
So what are these "statistical elements" that influence rankings? They are such things as total word count, keyword count, and keyword prominence. Each of these elements are weighted differently for the various areas of the page such as the title tag, meta tags, heading tags, links, and so forth.
While you can compare your page to the number one ranked page for a given keyword, there are notable risks in this strategy. For example, if the page's content has changed since the search engine last indexed it, then what you are seeing does not accurately represent what the engine originally saw. You may see 3 keywords in the title tag and think that's what the engine wants, when it actually prefers only 1 instance of the keyword in the title. Since an engine may only re-index the page once every 3 to 8 weeks, the potential for the page's content to change during that time-period cannot be ignored.
In addition, the page you're looking at could be "cloaked." This is a technique used by some Webmasters where one page is served up to the search engine and a different page to everyone else. While this technique is often frowned upon by the search engines and can put you at risk of being penalized, it is still an all-too-common practice. Therefore, if the page you are looking at is cloaked, you are not seeing the same content that the engine saw.
What do you do to ensure you're getting an accurate picture? One common technique is to average the results. The idea is that most of the top ranking pages will be based upon the content that the engine saw. Therefore, an average of the top 5 or top 10 pages will give you a more reliable representation of what you should shoot for on your own page.
But, who has the time to carefully count each word on dozens of pages, for dozens of keywords and page areas, on multiple search engines? That's where having a good SEO tool becomes essential.
Continued:
Search Engine Ranking Statistics: What The Search Engines Want (Part 2) >>>
This article is copyrighted and has been reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers of WebPosition.
FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings on the major search engines and to help you improve those rankings.
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