Just 5 years ago getting a high ranking in the search engines
was easy. As search engines have gotten smarter it has become
impossible to get a high ranking in the search engines with
gimmicks. Now the only way is to have one of the best pages
about your topic and lots of people agreeing that it is one of
the best by linking to it. Before explaining how to get high
rankings in the search engines it is important to understand
some basics about search engines.
If you were to run a search engine what would be your number
one goal. This one is simple; you would want to be the most used
search engine on the Internet. The only way to become the most
used search engine is accuracy. People use a search engine for
one reason and that is to find what they are looking for. When I
first started using the Internet 12 years ago, it was difficult
to find anything in a search engine. You would type in baby toys
and get hundreds of sex toy sites with a few baby toys sites
mixed in. Now you type in baby toys and you get baby toys. The
reason Google became number one was that for several years they
had the most accurate results. So if you want to get a high
ranking in a search engine for the terms your pages are about,
then you must give the search engine what it is looking for.
The search engines became more accurate because now they look
primarily at one thing. That one thing is content. The only way
for a search engine to find out what a page is about is to scan
the page and see what it is about. Yes, there are a few other
things the search engine looks at but none of those things matter
if the content does not match what people are typing in a search
engine. If you want to rank high in the search engines, you must
make a great page specifically about the topic that page is
about.
Natural Language
It also matters how you put your content on the page. One of
the things search engines look at now is natural language. You
cannot just put a search term a bunch of times on the page. It
is true than once upon a time that worked. But stacking search
terms no longer works. Search engines look at how many times a
term shows up in a sentence and how many times it shows up in a
paragraph. In a normal paragraph you will not have a search term
that shows up 6 to ten times. That is not the way a paragraph is
normally constructed. When a search engine sees this it counts
against you and not for you. The same is true about sentences.
So be careful how you word your content. Try not to put the same
term multiple times in a sentence or several times in a
paragraph.
It is also a good idea to make sure you write in complete
sentences and make your content read well. This is not just a
good idea for search engine consideration but also for the
reader of your page. You want them to find the page informative
and easy to read. Having them come back and telling their
friends about the page is important. If they find it interesting
enough, they may just give you that all-important link to your
page.
Here are some other things to consider about content.
The content of your page is not just limited to the words
written on the page. Search engines also look at how you present
your content and what you say about it. For example, every page
in your site should have a title. This is the first thing
written on the page such as the title to an article. When you
present a title you place it as a heading. Heading tags are a way
to tell the search engines this is what my page is about. To be
effective your heading needs to be about the same thing as the
rest of the content of your page. You can also put sub headings
on the page. You can title different sections of the page with
heading 2 or heading 3 tags.
Search engines also give you two places to tell them what you
think your content is about. This is done through your meta
title and description tags. These are the only two meta tags
that most search engines look at so far as determining how
they are going to rank your page. I do not even add a key word
tag to any of my pages. The meta title is the place where you
tell the search engine what your page is about. It can be
exactly the same as the title on the page itself (your H 1 tag
or page heading). Your description tag gives you the opportunity
to describe the content of the page to the search engine. The
description needs to be short and to the point. It should be no
more than two sentences but preferably only one sentence. There
is no reason a good description of a page cannot be made in one
simple but complete sentence.
Last but not least is the overall content of the page. Make
each page about one thing. The more topics your page talks about
the less credit you get for each topic. For example you want to
make a page about the three most influential people in medicine
today. You can make your first page generic and mention the
names of the three people and their general contributions to
medicine while concentrating on making sure every paragraph is
about the main topic of "most influential people in medicine".
Then, if you want to go into detail about the three individual
people, make a separate page about each and have them linked to
from the "most influential" page.
Article by Rusty Ford, Editor (http://arthritis-symptom.com/)
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