Search engine ranking - Are you playing by the rules?

By Richard Igoe

The internet is dynamic. New web sites are added every day, and search engines keep on changing the rules.

Using Pay-per-click campaigns like will get you guaranteed traffic but they cost money - you are buying the traffic - and as large corporations are wising up to this method of promotion there is more competition for the most popular keywords, bringing these prices out of reach of the small business.

There is however still plenty of scope here to bid for the less common search terms, particularly in niche markets.

Despite the monopolisation of top search engine results by pay-per-click engines, remember that over 70% of the first page results on the common major search engines are still based on the indexed results.

Yes, there are also the directories where your submissions are reviewed by a real person before being indexed, but with the enormous growth of the internet, it is impossible to directorize the whole web using experts, and to keep reviewing them! Good Search engines constantly crawl the web thus ensuring results are relatively current.

So spider-driven search engines will continue to play a major role in the way people find information. The more reliable a search engine's results, the more popular it will become and the more traffic you will get!

Some search engines rank your pages according to the meta tags alone, others on the content, and others on both meta tags and content. You may be surprised to learn that Google no longer uses the keywords tags when indexing your pages!

And to confuse the issue, the search engines are constantly changing their goalposts. Pages that rank high this month may not even come close next month!

Search Engine Watch has more details on just how each search engine indexes your website.

So to get a good ranking you need to have pages specially designed for the search engines - but how you do this is very important!

If you do it properly you will get a high ranking. If you don't your site could be banned from the search engine databases! They don't want irrelevant pages in their search results.

You used to be able to "trick" the search engine bots by using Javascript redirect scripts and Meta refresh tags in specially designed doorway pages. But now this is an automatic one-way ticket to the banned web-page list!

So what is the answer now to getting a high ranking. Highly focused pages which are full of good content are exactly what the search engines want. But if you design a page for "product X" then your meta tags and your content should be about "product X".

You can design a separate page for each of your products or services - and each benefit of each product or service - and each ... you get the picture!

But you have to be careful as too many very similar pages on one domain can also be viewed as spam!

-- HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR PAGES ---

Basically this involves analyzing what combination of keywords and text is giving the top 10 results on each search engine and applying this formula to your own web pages.

Doing this manually however is not time-efficient when much of it can be done automatically.

You have 3 options - depending on how much time and/or money you are prepared to spend. Only you can decide whether you have the time to optimize your own web pages, or whether your time is better spent developing content for your pages.

OPTION 1

Optimize the pages yourself - You can get relatively cheap software and do everything yourself. But be careful! - do not create too many very similar pages. You will also need to monitor your pages to make sure they are not dropped.

OPTION 2

Pay a Search Engine Optimizing company (SEO) to do the job for you. Although this will cost you quite a lot, it will save you months of trial and error, although much of search engine optimising does not give guaranteed results.

The problem with optimizing pages yourself is that it takes a LOT of your time and you have to wait a long time to see your results because some search engines only index you after months!

Imagine designing 5 different doorway pages for 10 different search engines - that is 50 pages, and if you manage one page per hour (which is fast) you will need to spend 50 hours only optimizing pages.

This does not include all the time you need to submit and monitor your pages to make sure they stay indexed - and to try and improve on your positions.
Also if you do get a good ranking, other webmasters can steal your code and put it on their web pages - your results get diluted!

OPTION 3

Keyword-focused content pages.

Whatever solution you choose, there will be a point when your time or your money becomes a limiting factor.

So right from the start you should aim at producing a content rich website that both the search engines and directories will like.

We have seen that search engines which give reliable results get a good reputation and become popular - which leads to more traffic. And if your site is not content-rich, the directories like Yahoo may not want it!

As well as using a webpage optimizing solution you should concentrate on designing a site with "keyword-focused content pages". Design a page for each section of your website - and keep on writing about what you know and adding more pages.

Your website will soon become a fount of knowledge for the products or services that YOU sell.

You can also have a look at RSS Website Builder if you want a way to automatically build unlimited numbers of pages based simply on your website theme and keywords.