Tips on Getting
Top Search Engine Positioning
Some people and
webmasters may think that submitting your web site to hundreds of
search engines will increase traffic to your site. Or that simply
inserting META
tags in your Web pages will also increase your traffic. Not so.
Over 95% of Web users find what they are looking for by visiting the
top 3 search engines. Yahoo alone
handled over 75 million searches and page views in December 2001.
Many of these
searches are for the products and services that you deal in,
guaranteed! Everybody knows that even a few good positions on even
one or two important keywords or phrases can drive thousands of
quality visitor traffic to a Web site per day. The top 10 results
receive 80% more traffic than those in position 11 to 30 do. The top
30 results get over 95% of the search traffic. This alone explains
why some sites do so well and others not so well, and why it is such
an advantage to be ranked highly.
So how do you position your web site at the top of search engine
results? One way is to use doorway pages also known as entry
pages. These are Web pages designed specifically to rank highly on a
specific search engine.
There are two
ways to go about creating doorways. You can either do it yourself or
have someone do it for you.
If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared to invest a
considerable amount of time on them getting the best doorway page
for a search engine is not an easy matter!
You should also
be prepared to make a number of doorway pages. You must make one
doorway page per keyword or keyword phrase that you want to be
positioned well in. For best results, depending on your site's
subject matter, you should target 10 to 20 keywords and keyword
phrases. Usually, a page that ranks well on one engine may not rank
well on other engines. Assuming that you want to make sure that you
are ranked highly on the five top engines AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos,
Infoseek and Excite (Yahoo does not accept doorway pages), you have
to make five versions of each doorway page, each Optimized for a
particular engine.
The hard part is in actually creating these doorways! Basically,
this is what it would involve:
First, you have to realize that ranking criteria varies from search
engine to search engine. Most place your site on the number of
keywords or keyword phrases placed on various parts of your pages in
combination with some or all of the items below.
-
Prominence of
the keyword searched - how early in a page a keyword appears.
(this could be in your
meta tags)
-
Frequency of
the keyword searched - number of times the keyword appears.
(Simply repeating the keyword will not work because grammatical
structure and keyword weight also plays a role).
-
Site
Popularity - a few search engines consider how popular your site
is when ranking.
-
The ratio of
keywords to all other words. Each search engine has a threshold.
If your page crosses that threshold, the engine labels it as
spam and ignores it.
-
Proximity of
keywords - how close together the keywords are to each other,
especially when the item searched for is a phrase.
-
Keyword
Placement - these are the locations where an engine will look
for the keyword, e.g. in the body, title,
META tags,
etc.
-
Grammatical
structure - some engines consider grammar in their calculations.
They do this to make it harder for spammers to do their thing.
-
Synonyms -
some engines look for words similar in meaning to the keyword.
These are the
various places that engines look for keywords:
