Every website has two types of audience – human visitors and search engine bots, both with different criteria of what a relevant page is. The same web page may be considered nice and its texts interesting and matching the request by human visitors, yet irrelevant by a search engine. Creating websites for search engines only, or ignoring their demands, are extremes you should avoid. Search engines help you in attracting people, so your site’s content must satisfy both people and bots.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of making your web pages so that search engines can find them the most relevant to the keyword request. The more relevant you page, the higher listing it gets in the search engine results page (SERP).

What does keyword relevance depend on?

Every search engine has its own algorithm to rank web pages, and no outsider knows for sure what it is based on. Reverse-engineering – tests and statistical analysis – is used to discover a pattern. With great certainty, however, we know that relevance depends on:  

• Keyword placement (presence of search keywords in different areas on the page)
• Link popularity and theme (Who is linking to your page and how search phrase is presented in link anchor texts)

Keyword placement is what SEO deals with to improve “on-the-page” factors that influence your rankings. Let’s focus on how search engines evaluate it.

How do Search Engines evaluate web pages?

To determine the relevance of a web page, search engines read a web page as a structured document. Search engines emphasize the importance of some areas of the document, and keywords found in them boost the web page’s ranking for the keyword. Below is the general structure of an HTML document with notes on the importance of keywords in different areas:

1. HEAD area. The top-level HTML tag contains one tag visible to the visitor (Title) and a few tags for robots only (META tags). For optimization purposes, the following tags must be keyword-rich:

A. Title tag. Browsers show content of this tag in the window caption and search engines often display it as the title of your listing. Placement of keywords in this tag is critical for getting high rankings.

B. META Description tag. This tag describes what the page is about and is not visible to humans using a browser. It should include your keyword because some search engines may use it in your listing as a description.

C. META Keywords tag. This tag should list comma-separated keywords related to the web page. This tag has little importance these days, but we recommend that you keep it.

2. BODY area. This HTML tag contains text visible to the visitor; the content of this tag makes a web page as you see it. Search engines read Body top down as well. Some of the most important areas from the SEO point include:

A. Visible text. This includes texts visible to the visitor. Web CEO simply reads text content of the <P>, <H1>, <A> tags on the page in the same way that many search engines do. The program will prompt how many times and in which areas your keyword should be used so that the page is considered optimized.

B. Headings. Headings are written in larger letters on a page; they attract attention because they introduce topics. Your page will have a better ranking if you include <H1> tag, with the keyword as its content. Web CEO looks for your keywords in the heading tags on the page and tells you if they are found.

C. Link text. You need to insert your keyword into the page's text and graphic links (<A>Keyword</A>). This is one of the most important areas on the whole page.

D. ALT text. This tag is an attribute to the <IMG> tag. It contains text description of an image. When your mouse hovers over it, the ALT text is shown. For many search engines, keywords in the alts are quite important.

Analysis of these areas includes calculation of some indicators. Frequency, Prominence, and Weight and Proximity typically are the indicators search engines use while ranking pages.

Frequency – is how often a keyword appears in a text.  

Prominence – is how close to the beginning of the tag content a keyword appears. A search keyword appearing close to the beginning of a page element makes your web page more relevant. If the keyword goes first, its prominence is 100 percent. 

Weight / Density – shows the number of times a keyword appears in an area as a ratio to all words on the page. The higher the weight of a particular search keyword on a page, the higher is the ranking of the page.

Proximity – relates to non-exact key phrase optimization. If the document includes all keywords a search engine user is searching for, but they are not in a row, the search engine must use some rules to find out if the document is about the query. It will see how close keywords in a text are, and if there are many unrelated keywords between the words making up a search term.

Keyword-rich texts are beneficial, but keyword staffing is harmful. Hold the middle ground to optimize your website for long-lasting success in search engines.

     

A Real Helper in SEO

To make your SEO activities easier, especially if you have no or little HTML coding practice, the Web CEO team created the Search Engine Optimization tool. It does many things in the same way as search engines do: it breaks your web page into areas critical for SEO and analyzes them, and it gives you a full optimization report with recommendations how to fix problems if your page has them. Using Web CEO, you’ll be competent at making SE-optimized pages.

Even if you are not good at HTML, Web CEO will help you—with a special Web Page Editor, a tool designed for editing all the important areas of your page in visual mode.

Feel safe to rely on the software that supports optimization for the major search engines. It will save you from penalties, pinpoint all possible problems by page area, and recommend necessary changes to make your site visible for both search engines and their users. Moreover, it can be used free! Just download the Free Edition of Web CEO, create an account, and start working your way to success!

Copyright © 2001-2008 Web CEO LTD