Top 10 Search Optimization Components

If you want to get high rankings in the search engines it’s important to know how search engines actually index websites. Here is a brief overview.

Before any page ranking or relevance determination is made the search engines must know your site is out there. In general, search engines learn about web pages through a variety of sources including manual submission and following links from other sites. Sites can also be discovered by site map submissions. And whenever a new page is added to a site that page also needs to be recognized.

When the search engines have indexed the pages then it is important to make sure the site is accessible to the bots that index the site. The crawl error reports can be invaluable when verifying that the site was indexed in full.

Now that the site is in the search engines the content of the site is analyzed by the search engine. This step serves to verify that the page content is accurately represented by the title, description, keywords, etc.

The Top 10

Now that you have an idea of how the search engines index the sites, you can address those items that really count toward high rankings. Here is the top 10 list as voted by the top 37 search professionals.

1. Since 1996 one of the keys to search engine marketing is the title tag. Just like any other brochure, pamphlet, etc., the title says it all. Using the right words in the title is an important start.
2. Links from other sites. “Think of a web page as a town. If a city has freeways, airports, train stations, bus shelters, and a port, that’s a good indicator that it is an important hub. That orphaned web page with no links pointing to it? It may as well be a hidden tribe of Amazons that no one has discovered.” – Lucas Ng (a.k.a. shor), Fairfax Digital online marketing analyst.
3. Text on Inbound Links. A link to your site is a great thing but the actual text that is linked is the ultimate message to search engines when determining the content of the website.
4. Internal link popularity. The links within a site to other pages within the site can be very helpful in obtaining high rankings especially, as mentioned above when the text linking the pages together has relevant text.
5. The age of the actual website itself. Older sites have more trust and that translates to credibility in the search engines as well as credibility for the sites linked by the older site. “We have seen new sites flourish as long as they have a clear connection to the ‘parent’ site that has already gained trust.” – Chris Boggs, Search Engine Land Associate Editor.
6. Relevance of inbound links. It is becoming more important to consider the text of the actual links AND the text surrounding the link. When all surrounding content is relevant to the page that is linked, the linked page is given more attention in terms of page rank and relevancy.
7. Popularity of links among similar, high-ranking, websites. For example, cell phone providers who are linked to Nokia would have a better page rank than cell phone providers who are linked to local cell phone accessory vendors.
8. Using keywords in the text of the page. This seems like common sense and it is. If you have a site that is talking about diets, then you need to be talking about diets and using keywords related to diets in the content of the site.
9. Also a strong consideration in the “web” is the importance, relevance of the pages that are linking to your site. Having a link from a site that enjoys a high page rank will naturally boost the overall position of your site. Although at this point it is important to note that the “page rank” as determined by Google is not updated as frequently as it appears on the toolbar so don’t consider that to be fully accurate.
10. Finally, the rate at which your site gains new, relevant links. Natural link building is the best way to achieve rankings so if a site suddenly has thousands of links overnight that might be a red flag to a search engine but gaining a large number of genuine links from relevant sites is definitely good for search marketing.