Search Engine Ranking Factors

This page focuses on Google's ranking methods, but they also generally apply to all of the major search engine families. There are several key areas of your webpages that are crucial to putting emphasis on your target keywords to obtain good rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Bing. More....

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Once you start to put some serious effort into search engine optimization, it becomes clear that some things you do have more effect on ranking than others. Naturally, the search engine companies like to keep their methods secret to preserve their ability to apply an automated, but objective, judgement on all of the pages in their index and to avoid having the search results artificially manipulated by unscrupulous search engine optimization techniques. Many factors have to be taken into consideration when a search engine does its ranking. Careful observation after many months of research and simple trial-and-error experimentation have led me to some broad conclusions. I present some of them here. Again, this information is biased for results on Google, but will generally hold true for all search engines.

Here's where to include keywords and phrases to enhance a page's search engine ranking for those terms (in approximate order of importance):

In the <title> tag.
In the <a>nchor text of incoming links. (especially Google and MSN/Bing)
In <h>eadlines, <b>old or <strong>, or <i>talics or <em>phasis tags.
In the <body> text - the closer to a <h1>eadline tag, the better.
In an <img> tag's ALT attribute (as appropriate and especially in <a>nchor tags).
In the page's filename.
In the subdirectory name.
In the <meta> keywords and description tags (no help for Google, some value in Yahoo! and perhaps Bing).

Once you have a page rich in content that properly emphasize your keywords, you can start paying attention to incoming links to that page in general in terms of the issue of PageRank (Link Popularity). Check the incoming links to a given page by entering "link:http://www.yoursite.com/thepage.html" first into Google to find the number well-ranked links that search engine sees. Note that the pages shown by Google's link: operator are not likely to be the sources of those high quality links. That is, Google's link: operator only displays a non-weighted sample of the links it knows of, so you don't need to pay attention to the actual pages shown to be links. Just note the number of high quality links it says it has seen. You'll find a more comprehensive list of links to your site in Google's Webmaster Tools console and the Yahoo! Site Explorer.

Then, once you have the Google results, enter the same "link:" command into Yahoo! to find almost all of the links pointing to the site. Keep a record of the number of links each of these search engines show for your site so that you can track your progress over time. Both Google and Yahoo! give differing credit to each individual links, so the effect of a link from a poor quality page with no related content will not help you as much as a natural link coming from a good quality page that discusses a related topic.

How Search Engines Rank Websites

When Your Car Is Broken,You Call A Mechanic

Search Engine Ranking Factors

When Your Car Is Broken,
You Call A Mechanic