Growth and Marketing

The idea behind the art of Search Engine Ranking is really pretty simple, basically it’s this:  “I want my page to rank high enough in the search engines that people will actually be able to find it.”  The actual execution of that idea is a little more complex. What do people have to enter into the search box at that search engine in order to find you and how do you go about getting on that page? This guide will get give you an understanding of some of the basics of search engine rankings, but there is a lot more to it than can be fit on this page.

Some people call search engine traffic free traffic. Pfft. The only thing free about it is that once your page ranks you don’t have to send the search engine any money. If costs you time and effort and possibly money to get those rankings, especially if you pay someone to do it for you.

Search Engines Take Things Very Literally

The first thing to understand is that the search engines, all of them, are very literal beasts. They do not understand the concept behind a website, implied meanings, and so on. They do not understand abstraction except in very limited terms. The engineers behind the search engines are working to improve on that, but they’re not there yet.

They might be able to define what good writing is, but it will be very much a textbook definition.  Slang won’t be understood at all, unless the programmers working on the system are able to understand that slang and code it into the system.

Put another way, if the definition of good writing, clarity, slang, etc., can be clearly defined then a search engine might be able to understand it well enough to do something with it. If you page is clear enough, as defined by the search engine programming, then you are moving in the right direction.

What’s Actually on the Page Counts

Another thing to understand is that the search engines, especially Google, generally rank individual pages more than entire sites for specific search phrases (keywords.) An individual page is far more likely to be topic specific than a whole site. For example, if you’re looking for adobe (note the lower case) you will get a whole page of Adobe.com sites. If you were looking for the building material, then there is that one lone Wikipedia entry for adobe mud bricks. If your page is about building stuff with mud bricks then you need to be more specific than just “adobe.”

As you might expect, if you search for adobe bricks you’ll see that Adobe.com is nowhere to be seen and the #1 entry is that Wiki page. Not the wiki home page, just the exact page with the info. What we can take away from this is that if we can clearly define what our page is about then our chances of appearing in the Search Engines are much better.

Note that this page is not titled Search Engines, but something a lot more specific.

When a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, whatever) comes looking at your site and your page it looks for specific things, which vary from engine to engine, and it tries to “understand” what the page, your topic,  is about.

Generally, it will look for a Title Tag in the code of your page, the actual title of the page, the content of the page, links to and from the page, and various other things. If the title tag and the page title and the content all match up for subject then your chances of ranking for subject are much improved.

If your title tag says “All About Athlete’s Foot” and your Page title says, “Biography of Harrison Ford” and your content bounces around from fishing to mud bricks to stained glass, then your chances of “ranking” are poor. What, exactly, would you be trying to rank for?

The search engine optimization meta tags page will give you a lot more info on the title tags and the other meta tags on your page.

A better choice would be to put every one of those topics on a separate page on your site, much like Wikipedia does. On your Athlete’s foot page there is only material dealing with that topic, nothing else. The same with the Harrison Ford pages, the stained glass page, and so on.

The best option would be to have each of those subjects on its own separate website. All of the Harrison Ford stuff would go on that site and the fishing stuff on another site, and so on.That way any visitor, or very literal search engine robot, can take a look at your page and know exactly what it’s about. Since the topic of the whole site would be in line with the page topic you page would get “points” to boosts its ratings.

Who Else Cites Your Stuff (ie: Linking)

Something that is even more important to your ranking anywhere is linking. Once you have your page up the search engines actually have to find it. The best way to do that is through links. If nothing links to your page then the chances are that it will be just a page in the wilderness. Get someone to link to it, however, and the engines will find that link and eventually hit your page and “index” it. With a lot of links this is likely to happen faster. With “higher quality” links this will also happen faster. Links to that page from pages that you already have “indexed” in the search engine also count.

How your site is linked to also matters. If the link to your Athlete’s Foot page says “Athlete’s Foot” in the clickable link text then your page gets a point in the rankings. If the link says something like click here then it won’t. Type click here into google and see who pops up. That’s because zillions to sites link to that site using the phrase click here. Even ClickHere.com (a marketing site) only ranks #3 (when I looked.)

If you had a zillion links pointing to your Harrison Ford page, with the text being Harrison Ford do you think you’d rank well if someone searched for that term? If you have a zillion links pointing to that page then it almost doesn’t matter what’s actually on the page. Once upon a time, it didn’t, given enough links. With Google, anyway. (Look up “Google Bomb” for more on that subject.)  Note the “click here” above. I don’t think Adobe was really trying to rank for that term.

These days it’s best if your links + title + subject + page content match. If you write articles promoting your stuff then the title of the article should match the content. The links to your site in that article should match the content of the article and the content of the page that you’re linking to. That way you have matches all the way down the line.

Keywords

The terms that people type into the search engine are called “keywords.” A keyword can be a single word or a long, complicated phrase. The phrases that people enter into the search engines to find your page are the keywords that your site ranks for. If I enter a term into google and that term matches the content and titles on the page and if it matches the links coming into that page and if your page does a better job at matching those factors than do the competing pages, then your page will rank well in the results that I see.

Competition will factor into this game, as well. if there are a lot of pages competing for that keyword then your page will have to do better than they do in order to rank higher. That’s what the better search engine page ranking game is all about. Getting enough matches and good links to beat the competition out and achieve higher rankings so that you can get all that free traffic that you put in so much effort to earn.

Good luck trying to rank for a keyword like mortgage loans, or adobe. You would need a well optimized page, zillions of good links to that page, and it would help a lot if your site was all about loans and was viewed as an authority on mortgage loans, though that’s not essential. Type Mortgage Loan into Google and see where wikipedia ranks. Ranking for a keyword like Mortgage loans for Seattle Washington would be easier, though not easy.

Domains, Authority, and Stuff

There are a lot of little factors that also go into earning better search rankings. The actual domain name of your site counts for bit, the topic of sites linking to yours counts, the authority of the site (yours and the linking sites) counts for a lot. If your domain name is topic specific then you get a point towards your rankings.

Wikipedia.com has massive authority in the “eyes” of the search engines. Any link from that site would count for a whole lot more than a link from some tiny little site that someone just created. The Wikipedia editors can put up a half decent page and it will rank well almost instantly, just due to the authority of that site.  Think of Authority for websites in the same way that you would a person or reference.  If Einstein (assuming he was still alive) were to say something about physics people would pay a lot more attention to what he had to say than they would to what I had to say. Even if I knew what I was talking about on that subject.

Once your site has a lot of links coming into it, from various places, it will gain in Authority and will, as a result, rank better for whatever subjects it covers.

Page Rank

Page Rank is a system the Google uses to measure how important any one page is.It ranges in value from 0 to ten, with zero being of trivial importance. Very few sites manage a ten. Naturally, Google’s home page is a ten and the mighty Wikipedia is a 9. If you download and install the Google toolbar you will be able to check out the page rank of any page you visit. You can find a similar tool for your Firefox browser.

As you have probably guessed, the better the page rank of any page which has your link the more value that link has to your page.

Puting it All Together for Better Rankings.

1. Make sure that your page sticks to the subject, in this case that’s better search engine rankings.
2. Make sure that the title of that page agrees with the subject.
3. Make sure that the title tag of the page also agrees with the subject.
4. Make sure that the phrase you want to rank for is included a few times in that page. Basically a person, or a robot, should be able to look at the page and say, “This page is about (subject.)”
5. Get links to your page, with those links using text that matches the page subject.
6. It helps if the incoming links are from pages with similar subjects, the closer the better.
7. The authority of the site linking to your page counts. The more important the site is, in the eyes of the search engine, the more that the link to your site will count.
8. Get lots of links.

If you want to use article marketing for your links then check out the WA Article Marketing Course. When you’re done you’ll be an expert on the subject.