A general look at the ten factors which influence search engine rankings (feel free to jump to the portions which interest you the most). I will go into more detail as time passes on each specific factor.
- Inbound Links
- Page Titles
- Metas
- Cross-Linking
- Outbound Links
- Relevant Content
- Descriptive Alternative Text
- Anchor Links/Text
- Relevant Keywords
- Sitemaps
1. What are Inbound Links? Inbound Links are links from other web pages which point to your own website or web page(s). For Google, each inbound link counts as a vote towards the destination webpage. The more inbound links to a particular web page, the more popular & influential that page becomes to a Search Engine. In addition, the types and quality of Inbound links matter when determining how one’s web pages rank.
2. Page titles: These are the words that fall between <title>tags</title>, usually located at the top of a web page. Duplicate titles and content are ignored by search engines. Make sure your title is unique and completely relevant to your web page. Do not put keywords in your title unless they are fully relevant to your page’s content, else you will be penalized.
3. Meta-tags: are divided into two categories. There are Meta-Keywords and Meta-Description tags. Limit your keywords to seven or less. Keywords should be separated by commas. Keywords in excess of 7-10 run the chance of getting your site flagged as a keyword stuffing site which will get you blacklisted/banned on Google. In addition, try to keep your keywords as highly relevant as possible to the page in question.
Meta-description tags should primarily contain a summary or a description of the page in question. Never put marketing collateral into these tags. The goal is to convey information about the page in question which will help guide the correct audience to your site.
4. Cross-Linking: refers to the purpose of linking your pages to each other. Remember, search engines are first and foremost – robots. A human being can look at the different menus and easily discern which is the most important based on location and size of font used, but a search engine cannot.
If there are five pages and each of the five pages link to each other, a search engine cannot discern which page is the most important page and which is the least important. In addition, according to Google’s PageRank engine, when a page links to another page, it is essentially giving that page one vote. The more votes a page contains from internal sources as well as external, the more importance that page has.
All pages start with one vote each. One link = one vote. Two links = half a vote. Three links = 1/3 a vote.
5. Outbound Links: These are links that point to other website pages outside of your own website.
6. Relevant Content: This cannot be stressed enough.
7. Descriptive Alternative Text: When one’s cursor is over an image, well-optimized sites will contain text for people with disabilities & search engines which will float into view on top of the image. Descriptive Alt tags are a must for successful search engine optimization campaigns.
8. Descriptive Link Text: Descriptive links follow the following definition. Google is the world’s number one search engine. The term Google is a link. The sentence describes exactly what will happen if one clicks on the link. For a search engine, more weight is given to the word Google as a possible keyword choice because the page in question is linking somewhere which contains content on Google. Take a look at the keywords on your page and try to build your content so it utilizes your keywords as descriptive links. As with all things, do not go overboard. It should be like a well written essay with proper headings describing the content of each topic paragraph.
9. Relevant Keywords: Possible keywords can be generated using Google’s Keyword Extraction tool which can be accessed via Google’s Adwords Interface. Select the page & country and Google will crawl it and pull out all the keywords which it thinks are relevant to your page. The keywords generated by Google are based on actual Google Searches. The other way to do it is to generate the keywords yourself – but this is highly prone to errors. Companies and individuals tend to think that they know exactly what goes on in the mind of the customer, most do not. Another good way to find relevant keywords is to install a Google Search Bar in your website and log the words that individuals enter when they visit your site. It will give you a good idea of what keywords suspects are using once they come to your website.
10. Sitemaps: are a listing of all the pages on your web page. These are typically submitted to search engines via their respective interfaces to help index your site. Sometimes web pages contain forms and dynamic pages which utilize flash which in turn possess links embedded in them. In order to help search engines realize that these “other” pages exist, sitemaps are submitted.