Copyright 2005 Peter Tarrida del Marmol
When we are talking about search engine ranking, the first thing
you need to think about is the market place. Many people ask
themselves, how many keywords should I put in my anchor text?
What is the keyword density that I should have on my page?
Should I use 300 words on my copy or should I use 500 words? Can
I use flash? How many keywords should I put in my "alt" text?
Etc...
Here is a general statement: magic numbers do not exist. The
most important thing you can understand as a search engine
optimization expert is the following: algorithms change. Just
when you think you understand what is going to make you number
one for a search phrase in a search engine, something could
change, and you might have to spend months or years trying to
find out the engineering of the algorithm again.
It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm and do
something much easier instead, observe your competitors. All you
need to do is to understand what elements are your competitors
using that are making them rank on the top positions.
Let's see what those things are:
- Number and quality of inbound links pointing to your site -
Keyword density - Fresh content
The first thing to observe from your competitor's sites is their
back link index. This means the number of sites that have a link
pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to
Google and type: "link://
www.yourcompetitorssite.com". But it
would be a mistake to do this only on Google, as Google
discriminates sites much more than other search engines. Yahoo
and MSN are much more accurate for measuring the back link index.
Part of the observation should be not only what the links say,
but where the links come from. Think on what is the category
where those links come from. If you start to see a recurring
pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming
from that category.
Some marketers use special software for robotic content
creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing
to their sites. This practice can be dangerous, as Google may
penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of
service. And what happens is that those links do not look
natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following
day have 2.050 links, which all say the same thing and come from
the same IP address.
If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you.
You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how
they are getting linked to.
The second thing you need to observe is the keyword density of
your competitors. How many times should we repeat our main
keyword? In which part of the web page should our main keywords
be mentioned? There is no magic number, again it's all about
observing and measuring against your competitors. But what
should we measure?
- Meta tags - Alt tags - Titles - Names of the images on the
page - Highlights: h1, h2, h3... - Frequency and position of the
keywords on the body text
Each one of these items should be measured independently. There
are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If
you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to
understand the secrets of top rankings.
Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you
may fail in over optimization. This is when you use keywords too
often or too early. If you look unnatural, your page ranks will
suffer as a result.
The key to success is to understand what Google likes about
their top 5 pages, and to apply this to your own website
promotion.
The last thing to observe is how much fresh content do the top
sites have. If they have many articles and they are continuously
adding new content to their sites, then it is clear that the
search engines like content and are ranking better those sites
which have more and more updated information.
People that surf the web are usually searching for information,
so content is the "fuel" of internet traffic. If you want to
attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to
make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to
their interests.
About the author:
Peter Tarrida del Mármol uses special software tools to observe
competition and increase search engine rankings. To learn more
go to:
http://www.auctionearnings.com/seoelite
