Search Engine Factors
Nearly all people on the Web visit search engines to find information or
Web sites. They enter keywords into the search line of these search engines.
Often they enter several keywords, or "phrases," to further refine
their searches. Search engines are in the business of sorting Web sites in their
databases by the words they contain that match a given search.
How well you incorporate important keywords into your Web site consistent
with each individual search engine's ranking criteria will determine your Web
site's rank. Since there could be thousands of pages with that same keyword or
phrase on it, it's important that you rank near the top of the results to be
found.
Generally, each search engine assigns "points" to Web sites or the
submission someone made describing that Web site based on some predefined
criteria. While this ranking criteria may vary from search engine to search
engine, most "grade" the page based on the following general rules:
Keyword Placement (Area)
The area in which the keyword is found plays a key role for many searches.
Having the keyword in the Title tag on most search engines will give more
relevance to the page than the same keyword appearing in the body area. To rank
well generally requires you have keywords in many of the areas in which a search
engine looks.
The areas that are the most important will vary by search engine. Examples of
"areas" of a page are Title, Heading, Link Text, and Body. See Areas
for more information.
Keyword Frequency
Frequency is how often a keyword appears on the page or in an area on the
page. In general, the more times a keyword appears on the page, the more
relevant it will be to that search.
You don't want to go overboard with frequency since many engines will
penalize you for keyword "spamming" if they feel you were excessive.
In general though, use your keyword in the document in as many different areas as you can, and as many times as is recommended for that engine.
Total Words
This is simply a count of the total words in a given area, not including HTML
tags. Some engines may rank pages more favorably based on whether they have a
certain number of words on the page. Sometimes the fewer words the better, and
on other engines, more words are sometimes better.
Keyword Weight
Keyword weight is the percentage or concentration of keywords on your page in
relation to all other words on the page. A "keyword" can be either a
single word, or a short phrase.
Keyword weight refers to the number of keywords appearing in the page area
divided by the total number of words appearing in that area. The weight will
vary depending on
whether the keyword is a single word or a multi-word phrase.
Weight Formula
(number of words in the keyword phrase * frequency) / total words in
area
Therefore, you're weight will logically increase when the number of keywords
on the page increases or the number of words on the page decreases.
Some search engines consider keyword weight when determining the rank of your
page for a particular keyword search. In general, the higher the weight the
better, but only to a point. If your weight becomes too high, you may be
penalized.
WARNING: Simply dividing the frequency by the total words on the Page Analysis table will not yield the correct weight when the keyword is
a multi-word phrase.
For example, if the area had only three words in it:
My Blue Widgets
And the keyword phrase was "Blue Widgets," then the following
statistics would be displayed:
- Frequency:
1
- Total
Words: 3
- Weight:
66%
The reason weight is not 1 divided by 3 in this case, or 33.3%, is that the
keyword occupies two of the three "word slots" in the title,
commanding a 66% weight. If we didn't compute it this way when doing an exact
search, then a title of:
Blue Widgets
would yield a frequency of one, and a word count of two. However, it's
obvious in this example that simply dividing 1 frequency by 2 words is not
correct since it would yield a 50% weight rather than a 100%. The weight must
logically be 100% because there's no way a title called Blue Widgets with a
keyword phrase of Blue Widgets could have a higher weight. 100% of the words in
the area are already keywords, thus yielding a 100% weight.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter much how weight is calculated exactly so long
as it is consistently applied for each page analyzed. If top ranking pages tend
to have a 3% weight as computed by the Page Critic, then 3% is what you want to
shoot for regardless of how the 3% if computed. The goal is to emulate the
statistics of top ranking pages. If you focus on emulating the frequency and
word count of top ranking pages, your weight will generally fall in line.
Keyword Prominence
Prominence is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In
general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be
more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an
area, or even toward the end of the area.
For example, an Infoseek search for keyword "Pre-Owned Electronics"
returned the following match:
Pre-Owned Electronics, Inc - Refurbished and Used Apple Macintosh Systems,
The independent source for new, remanufactured and used Apple Macintosh computer
systems, parts, peripherals and accessories. We offer a full line of refurbished
as well as used… 98% http://www.preowned.com/ (Size 3.1K)
Note that the queried keyword, "Pre-Owned Electronics," is the
first word of the site title and InfoSeek returned this site as the first match.
Documents that are exactly the same, but with keywords as the second or third
word in the Title will often score lower. Prominence also applies to the words
within the body of the document, the headings, and other tags.
Prominence plays a critical role particularly in directory based engines such
as Yahoo. Often having the keyword slightly more towards the beginning of the
site description or site title will make a large difference in your ranking.
Examples of prominence:
- If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be
100%.
- If a keyword appears in the middle of an area, its prominence will be around
50%.
- If the keyword appears at the beginning of the area, then another repetition
appears at the end of the area, the prominence would be 50%.
- If the keyword appears at the end of the area, prominence would be 0%.
- If the area consists of multiple parts (like having 3 heading tags on the
page) then all three areas are treated as a single contiguous area when
prominence is calculated.
In summary, you don't need to worry too much about how prominence is
calculated. Basically it is only a score to give you a general indication of how
close to the start of an area for which your keywords appear.
Site Popularity
This ranking measurement is sometimes called a site's significance ranking because it is believed that one measure of a site's "value" is
the number of other Web sites who felt your site was sufficiently important to
link to.
If lots of other sites link to your site, chances are your site is relatively
important -- or so a good number of other Web site owners thought so. The
popularity of the site that links to you can also play a role.
For instance, at least 315,990 Web sites link to the IBM (www.ibm.com) Web
site in AltaVista's index (on January 21, 1998). In certain search engines, IBM
would achieve better ranking with all other factors being equal. However, this
is only one factor, and you can certainly achieve high rankings without being
linked from thousands of sites. This is simply another reason why you want to
get other sites to link to yours. Sometimes if you agree to link to them,
they'll do the same for you. In Web marketing, this is called
"cross-linking," sometimes called "reciprocal linking" and
is another way to increase traffic to your web site.
Other Factors
There are many other factors that can influence your ranking besides those
mentioned previously, many of which will be mentioned in the Page Critic advice
table.
For example, another factor to keep in mind when building your Web pages is keyword
proximity. This refers to the placement of keywords on a Web page in
relation to each other or, in some cases, in relation to other words with a
similar meaning as the queried keyword. For search engines that grade a keyword
match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase "home loans" will
outrank a citation that mentions "home mortgage loans" assuming that
you are searching only for the phrase "home loans". Therefore, always
try to group words together that might be searched on as a single phrase by a
user. At least 80% of searches on average will be for two or more keywords.
WebPosition's Page Critic attempts to display the major statistics believed
to be used by the search engines to determine relevancy. However, since the
search engines do not publish their formulas, any statistics provided in the
Page Critic are only approximations or estimates based on our research of how
the search engines score a page.
IMPORTANT TIP: Use the Page Critic Advice table first to improve you
rankings. For additional help, study the statistics in the Page Analysis table.
Your goal is to try and make your page have similar statistics to those pages
that already rank well. You can do this by comparing your page to specific page,
a group of TOP ranking pages, or to the TOP Averages for that engine. The
comparison options may be set on the second tab of the Page Critic screen.
Making your numbers "higher" than your competitors is not always going
to help. Most engines rank pages well that appear within acceptable ranges. If
you exceed their limits, you can actually hurt your ranking, rather than helping
it.
Note: The information presented here adapted, under license agreement, from FirstPlace Software. |
