When search engines
rank a page they do not put the best sites at the top, they put the bad stuff at
the bottom.
Being the "best" is subjective. It means different things to different people.
What might be "best" for me might not be for you. This took me a long time to
figure out but once I did it was a revelation.
I have looked at literally hundreds of thousands of websites, a great portion of
these being in the top percentile returned for a search term.
It has long been a habit to give a quick look at the source code, do a rough
check for keyword use, and look at the way the topic is presented.
IMO It is easier to program a search engine to subtract for specific data than
it is is to add bonus points for relevancy.
You can tell the spider to subtract points if words are repeated, be it in the
meta tags or in the page copy. If a word is repeated too many times, if it is
set to a color that blends in with the background, if the site uses a method of
"cloaking" or sending the search engines to one page and visitors to another, or
any other thing they feel detracts from the relevance of the page.
However it will not add points if the site is easy to use, or if it looks good,
or sells better than a similar topic site. These factors are part of page rank.
PR will go up if other site owners find your site fills their needs as a
resource, for whatever the reason.
In this manner the search engines use human input to determine the way the page
ranks.
They have the spiders to check and move offending sites to the ranking nether
regions, and human input to add to the plus side of the ledger from the links
placed on others sites.
To get your site to the top of the organic rankings heap you must have a
strategy.
This starts with keyword research. Think about what terms would be used to find
your site and individual pages in the site.
Start with the broad search phrases, (short tail), and branch out to narrower
search terms, (long tail). Over 80% of all online transactions begin with a
keyword search.3
For the short tail the
search engines give the most "weight" to the index page and correspondingly less
weight as one progresses deeper into the file structure. The long tail terms,
the searches for things like product numbers, less searched for longer terms,
are more easily satisfied due to relevance. (Need an example? Search in Google
for "Class EB-400" - no quotes - and Kids Culinary Adventures shows up in number
one. If you look in this page the term shows in the header, the body near the
center of the page and at the end.).
When search engines rank
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