Main Index
Click any heading to be taken to that item.
Search engine relationships and which engines to try for first.
Research your keywords.
Things that search engines like in general.
Things that search engines dislike and will penalize you for.
Sections in a page as seen by a search engine.
Differences between Google and most other search engines.
Linking and page rank etc.
Search engine relationships.
It may not be generally known but search engines feed off each other. Scoring well with one engine therefore will see you shoot up the rankings with others. You can see how the engines interact by clicking this link Search Engine Relationships
From the chart on that site you can see that unquestionably more sites feed with information from Google than any other. The drawback with Google though in some cases, is that Google will not handle new sites and your site will have needed to be established for close to a year before they will publish your results.
The importance of these search engines is generally accepted as being :-
#1 Google
#2 Yahoo
#3 MSN
#4 Ask (Previously called Jeeves)
The speed with which they react to new pages and page changes differ, but generally MSN is much quicker than the others and I always recommend designing pages for MSN first.
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Keyword selection.
It would be a very simple matter to design a page and come top with the keyword phrase of "esoteric thingmybobs" the trouble is that nobody ever looks for esoteric thingmybobs. You need a phrase or keyword for your page that is used and preferably without too much competition.
You can suggest a keyword or phrase to this engine and it will tell you how often it handled that phrase in the previous month. Try keyword phrases
I input the phrase 'search engine optimization' and saw it was searched for on that small engine 13,000 times in the last month, but it also suggested other similar phrases that I might create pages for.
These pages which are designed to capture different enquiries from search engines and make them the entry page to the whole site are called 'Doorway Pages' and there is no limit to the number of doorway pages you can create. Beware not to make any two too similar or the search engines will penalize you heavily. Each doorway page must comprise unique content and that means creating a page as if the previous page didn't exist.
Having found a keyword or phrase which is used frequently, go to one of the big engines like MSN and or Google and input the phrase. That will show you at the top how much competition there is for that phrase. Ideally you would like a word or phrase (Preferably a phrase) which is well used but not too many competing pages.
If you can find such a phrase with just a couple of million competing pages you stand a good chance of appearing high up on page one.
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Search engine likes.
These are some of the things you might consider if creating a new page from scratch, although the same principles apply for modifying an existing page.
There is absolutely no doubt that the most important thing about your site is it's name. Look at the top scorers for any popular pages and you will see the keywords in the title. So, if you sell flange bolts in the UK and that is your target market, you should register www.flange-bolts-uk.co.uk or www.flange-bolts-uk.com as your site name.
If you are too late to do that and already have an established site you want to improve your rankings with then the next most important thing is to make sure the title of your index page contains "Flange Bolts UK"
The index page is the most important individual page on your site and therefore adding the keywords into the title of the page is a must.
Other doorway pages optimized for different keywords should always be in the root directory and should always contain the keywords in the page name. Maybe you do steel flange bolts and perhaps plastic flange bolts. As a beginner you should create two doorway pages steel-flange-bolts.html and plastic-flange-bolts.html
I suggest you read the above section about search engine likes again. Nothing you will ever learn about search engine positioning is as important as I have just said.
Now a few generalized points which will help your page score over the others. In any section of your page, try to use the keyword phrase at or towards the beginning of that section. So your pages Meta Description should use the keyword phrase at the very beginning or as close to the beginning as possible. The same goes for the Meta Keywords. For those unfamiliar with Meta Tags click this link meta tags
Page Title.
All search engines like short snappy titles and you should aim for 5 to 8 words in the page title whilst making sure your keywords all appear in the title and as close to the beginning as possible.
Description
Quite often you will find search engines using your description in their search results, so a short description of about 10 words is ideal.
Keywords.
make sure that your keywords are at the very beginning of the Keywords tag and avoid stuffing it with your words more than once and beware of repeat words being next to each other. Ideally about 10 words in the keywords, but you will frequently find top sites who exceed this figure, so see what your competitors are doing.
Headings.
It is important to have one or two headings containing your keywords. Search engines don't seem to care where a heading appears on a page, so resist the temptation to make the first words on your page a heading, because they do you more good as large text.
Alts with images.
The next thing to do which is suitable for all search engines is to make sure you have at least 3 images on your page which are at least the size of your little fingernail and to make sure they Alt tag is given with your pages keywords in it. If you have more than 3 images on your page, make sure it is the first 3 images that have your keywords in the alt. If unfamiliar with the Alt tag click here Alt for images.
Link Texts
These are words on the page which when clicked take you somewhere else. In general terms again, search engines look at these and react, so like the Alt statement always aim for 3 link texts which contain your keywords so, if your main page that you are working on is flange-bolts-uk you could create links to flange-links-plastic and call it flange links uk Now you have your keywords as text links and they also score again for the page you linked to.
Hyperlink images.
These are images on your page, which when clicked take you elsewhere. Unlike a text link there are no words on your page so you can only score with them from the page they point to. There is though nothing to stop you making an image to the page you are on like this 
and since the page name itself probably contains your keywords you win. It is a useful technique to put anchors into a page at least one at the top so that you can link to it, using your keywords as part of the anchor name and thus not appear to be cheating to the search engines, although of course you are.
Page size.
All the engines seem to show a preference for the page size and if you are designing a page from scratch you should aim for a page size of between 250 and 500 words. It is always easier to get a higher score from search engines with small pages, but below about 250 words there is a fair chance you will be penalized.
Make sure you use your keywords at the very beginning of the text on your page. It is also a good idea to make your keyword phrase bold somewhere on the page and lastly try and use it within the last 25 words also.
Use a couple of headings on your page, again using the keywords toward the front of the heading.
When creating text for your page try to include the keyword phrase much more in the first half of the page than the latter half.
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Search engine dislikes.
All search engines dislike being fooled and they have become pretty good at spotting cheating. So a few things to beware.
Do not use cloaking or other techniques to try and fool search engines. They are better at it than you are and it is only a matter of time before your entire site will be banned. Once banned it is almost impossible to get it reinstated.
Never have keyword repeats next to each other anywhere in your page. Search engines see it as spamming and will penalize you heavily for it.
Never try to hide things by using the same colour text as background or even close.
Your site will need a few sites linking to you, but beware the so called 'Link Farms' who will get you hundreds of links from other sites. The search engines look for this and if your links suddenly rocket up you will get very heavily penalized.
Frames. Search engines have never fully handled frames in Web pages and you are unlikely to ever score well with a page using frames.
Flash. Although many sites use Flash and it creates an interesting heading take care. Search engines look at a site from the top down and where Flash occupies 100% of the page width, the search engines will not be able to read past it.
Never over-stuff your page with keywords. The number of words on your page divided by the times your keyword was used should not exceed 7% maximum.
Try not to overstuff your pages with Keywords. Yahoo likes to see a total of about a dozen uses on the page including headings, hyperlinks, title etc. google about 20 and MSN no more than 30 so bear those numbers in mind if you are designing a new page.
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Areas that search engines examine.
Different engines examine different areas of your pages. They all look at your site name for keywords and they all look at the title of your page similarly.
The Meta Tag Description is used by some but not by all.
The Meta Tag Keywords again is used by some but not by all.
Things like the importance of the Alt attribute vary from engine as do hyperlinked images.
Headings are examined by all as are text links and the text itself.
As a rule of thumb therefore try to optimize all sections as described in this guide. Although you get the overall keyword use limits from the different major search engines free for the first six months and thereafter as part of your standard maintenance.
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Google is different from others.
The biggest thing to remember when designing for Google is that it actually reads your pages differently. Whereas other search engines perform as though looking for the whole of your keyword phrase, Google finds keywords within other and longer words.
For example. If the keyword phrase was "Monday morning" and the Title was "Most mornings are better than Mondays" Most engines would return a Nil result because neither of the words 'Monday or Morning" were found. Google though discovers the word morning inside mornings and the word Monday within Mondays.
You can use this to effect when creating pages. Yahoo only likes to find your keywords up to about 12 times in total in your page, whereas Google likes it a lot more. By using plurals of your keywords or placing the keyword inside a longer word, in the Title, Headings, text links etc. You build the score on Google without effecting your score on Yahoo.
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Linking and page rank etc.
These are called off the page factors which can effect your position but perhaps not by as much as people imagine.
It is important to have at least a few sites linking to you and half a dozen are generally enough. They should come from companies in related or similar businesses or at least businesses that might relate to each other, perhaps like car hire and hotels. Your Google Page Rank is related to the number of inbound and reciprocal links you have, but page rank only seems to matter when two sites score highly for the page and Google has to chose which comes first. Links which are inbound only score more highly than reciprocal links so Join forums and Blogs and get your site name in those. It's a proven technique that works.
Although the other engines don't generally count page rank as Google does it is nevertheless important to get a few links that can be seen by all the big search engines.
Google have a browser tool-bar which shows you the page rank, as seen by Google, for any page you visit. You can download that toolbar for free at :- Google's Toolbar
Each of the major search engine players will give you information on linking, pages of your or someone else's site they have indexed. if you ask it in this form
go to the search engine you want to interrogate and input
site:www.nameofyoursite.com or .co.uk or whatever your sites name is.
That will return you all the pages on your site the search engine knows about. It is also useful because alongside each indexed page you will see the cached page option and if you look at the cached page, it tells you the date when the search engine last updated your page in it's files. That can tell you how the work on your page has effected your results. After all if you created or modified a page, there is no point in expecting position changes in your ranking until the search engine has updated itself.
Similarly link:www.yoursite.com will show you all the sites that search engine has found which link to you. No two search engines ever seem to find the same links so it is always worth checking you have enough from that particular engine you are optimizing for.
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