Web Site, how You Can Get Tip-Top Internet Ranking

Posted by arlene

Search engines, directories, and portals all include search capabilities in their offerings, and they usually work in more or less the same way — user types topic of interest into text box, user clicks Search button — you know the routine. The search is executed, and the results are returned in a list that’s been sorted based on criteria set up by the search-site producers. All clear? Your goal, then, is to manipulate matters to your advantage.

You want your site ranked among the first 20 or 30 sites that appear when a user searches for a topic closely related to your site’s topic. Anywhere below the top 30, and your site is not likely to be seen or clicked. The bad news is that everyone else with a site like yours wants the exact same result. More bad news is that search sites, like all businesses, constantly refine and improve their processes, so the techniques that sites use to get a good ranking one month may not work forever.

So just how do you get your site listed among the top 30? Good question. Climbing to the top of these lists may seem as daunting as scaling Everest, and sometimes getting your site listed at all seems to depend on the alignment of the stars or some magic formula. Well … formulas are involved, and you can improve your chances of getting a good listing by optimizing your Web pages.

Get popular — it counts

Keep this in mind when trying to get your page listed with a search engine, directory, or portal: Directories and portals are usually interested in listing only the top (home) page of the Web site and maybe a few other selected pages that have knockout content. Search engines, on the other hand, send their Web-crawling robots out to gather everything. These ‘bots start with a link to your site (which may be a link that you submit to them) and follow all the other links on that page through your site until they’ve indexed everything they can. Then they follow all the links that leave your site. Although many people find your site by following links on other pages, the corollary is that robots can also find your site more often if other sites have links to your site.

Furthermore, directories and portals are generally more likely to select those sites that have gotten people’s attention already (or are likely to). And Google ranks the sites that show up in a list of search results based entirely on popularity. So how popular your site is has an effect on how well it is recognized by search sites. And this, friends, underscores yet again that all of your site promotion efforts affect each other. To enable the best possible ranking of your site in a user’s search for your topic, you must promote your site well, make it popular, and optimize it for relevancy rankings.

Optimize your design

As we note earlier, search sites constantly update and change the way they compile data. What’s more, different search engines work differently. But most use some mathematical formula based on algorithms to determine the relevancy of a site and, thus, its ranking. The exact formulas used by each search engine are carefully guarded trade secrets, so even if we knew them, we couldn’t talk. We do know this: Search engines that rank on relevancy take into consideration how often certain words in some combination appear in the Web page’s URL, in the page title (as it appears in the title bar at the top of the browser window), in the page’s text (including the title that appears on the page itself), and the page’s keyword and description META tags. The frequency and combination these words appear in determines the relevancy of the page to particular searches.

Follow a few simple guidelines, and your site’s pages have an improved chance of getting a high ranking in the commonly used search engines. Note, however, that using these techniques doesn’t guarantee anything. But ignoring these guidelines does guarantee something — that you will not get a high ranking! Start by considering the following points:

• Directories are compiled by living, breathing people. They prefer good sites over bad ones. A site with compelling content and easy-as-pie navigation will catch a reviewer’s attention and have a leg up on less-appealing sites.
• Using frames (panes within the window that’s a Web page) or image maps (large graphics that contain embedded links to other sections of the Web site) in your site’s design trips up some search engines The structure of the HTML used in coding such pages just isn’t digestible to crawlers and indexes, so they simply skip over such sites. Similarly, search engines have a hard time indexing dynamically created pages (pages that retrieve content and images from a database).

• You can work around these issues. For example, you can create a straight HTML page as a “jump” page that users must pass through to get to the goodies, and have the jump page listed instead of the actual page; however, the disadvantage in doing this is that it places the stuff people came for one click deeper into the site. Check Search Engine Watch for other techniques, and in general, consider carefully whether your reason for using frames, image maps, and the like is worth the downside.

The structure of HTML tables and JavaScript used to create some Web page’s effects can push the tags and content that’s of interest to crawlers so far down the page that the page becomes unreadable to the crawler. You need to take this into account as you create the page templates.

Much ballyhoo exists about META tags — special tags that perk up the interest of some search engines. (META tags identify specific pieces of information the search engines will store in their databases.) META tags are no miracle. They provide an opportunity for you to embed defining information in your site’s code, which in turn helps search engines identify and index the site’s pages correctly. But not all search sites recognize all the usual META tags, and, as we’ve mentioned, having the right META tags is only part of a bigger picture that can include site popularity and other factors. Nonetheless, to have any chance of getting the good ranking you hope for, you must attend to your META tags as well as other coding tricks.

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