Factors Involved in Search Rankings

Any business that has a Web site is interested in attracting browsers. Marketing tactics inform customers about your product/services and site. The Web is a marketing tool in itself. Many use services such as pay-per-click and search engine optimization to rank higher on engines. It is advantageous for any business with a Web site to understand how search engines rank pages.

Understanding the algorithmic logistics of search engines enables a site to manipulate their pages in order to rank higher organically. The following article features insights referring to popular methods that achieve higher rankings on search engines. It is not an exact science (with the algorithms never remaining static), but tenaciously implementing the following suggestions drastically helps rankings.

Suggestions

- Place your targeted keyword in the title of your pages’ HTML headers. This helps engines know what a specific page’s content is about.
- The anchor text of your inbound links and the text surrounding it alert browsers about the content of your site. How and why others link to you is of high importance.
- The entirety of your link popularity plays a big role. How many links go to your site and the quality of those links (what kind of sites they are from) helps your overall rankings.
- Search engines factor in the age of your indexed content. Interruptions may occur if the domain switches ownership.
- Have links from other pages go to targeted pages. Essentially, the popularity of each page is supporting others.
- Facilitate the subject-specific relationship between a page’s target keywords and the pages linking to it.
- Gain as many links from others in your industry as possible. The engines evaluate your link/weight authority against that of your topical peers.
- Use your target keywords often in your content (as long as it makes sense and does not disturb the flow of the content).

Tactics NOT to practice

- Make sure your site and all pages are accessible to an engine’s crawl bots. If they cannot search your site, you cannot be ranked (or will fall in rankings dramatically).
- In addition to not having duplicate content from an outside site, do not have duplicate content.
- Do not link out to low quality sites. This will only lower your credibility to browsers and lower your rankings on the engines.
- Do not overuse your keywords. Yes, it is good to use them in the body of the content, but without force.