As you well know, getting a good listing on the search engines
can really help get some good, quality traffic to your site.
But how do you get a good listing? That's the million dollar
question.
Rather than explain how search engines select the top sites
or how to trick them into listing your site in the top 10,
let's learn some of the facts about search engines.
Now in case you're wondering why I don't just give you the
'magic' formula or algorithm for getting a good search engine
placement I'll give you:
Fact Number 1: Search engines change their formula frequently
in an attempt to keep quality sites at the top of the listing.
They do this because of all the attempts to 'trick' or 'fool'
them and, to stay popular with their users, they need to list
the most relevant sites first.
Fact Number 2: Every search engine has it's own formula
for determining the sites and the ordering of the sites it
will list. And even though they all use many of the same factors
in their formulas, there is no 1 formula that will work for
all of them.
As for giving you some of the tricks that others have tried
to use to get good search engine placement, I'll just say that
the tricks that have worked in the past like using misleading
meta tag keywords and embedding hidden keywords don't work
today and the new tricks like creating lots of 'spam' sites
using automatic search engine page creators won't be working
much longer.
Fact Number 3: Search engine owners know the tricks
being used and develop ways to filter them out.
Now that you know that there is no 1 'magic' formula and using
a 'trick' won't work for long, you should also know:
Fact Number 4: Search engines do 'black list' sites
they consider 'spam' and block them from being listed.
Because of all the articles and products about Google, you
may think that Google has become the search engine of choice.
And while Google is gaining in popularity,
Fact Number 5: Google still hasn't captured Yahoo's
number 1 position.
Even though Google isn't number 1,
Fact Number 6: Using 'good advice' on how to improve
your Google position will also help you with your placement
on Yahoo and many other search engines.
Some of 'good advice' for getting a good position is to have
a site with good content and to use your keywords within your
content. But the web has become so big that there are now thousands,
even hundreds of thousands, of pages competing for the same
keywords.
Because of this explosion in the number of pages available
for generic keyword searches,
Fact Number 7: Search engine users are now adding more
descriptive terms in their searches.
Another fact that most people don't realize about search engines
is that:
Fact Number 8: Search engines don't rank or list web
sites, they rank and list web pages. That means every page
of your site has the potential to be listed if you set it up
properly.
Since we're getting into the realm of less known search engine
facts, let's talk about how
Fact Number 9: Search engines use their own traffic
tracking information to
help determine which sites to list. If they see that they have
a top site that continually gets visited for a brief amount
of time and the searchers usually come back and continue looking,
the search engine may determine the site is of little value
and either move it down on the list or remove it.
The last fact isn't really about search engines but has been
included to help you measure your progress as you work to improve
your search engine positions.
A couple of terms you've probably seen many times are "Google
Page Rank (PR)" and "Alexa Traffic Ranking". While both measure
different things,
Fact Number 10: Google PR and Alexa Traffic Ranking
are 2 of the best indicators on how well your search engine
optimization work is going. Improving your Google PR and your
Alexa Traffic Ranking can help you get a better search engine
position.
Susan Carroll owner of http://www.friendswhocare.us has
formed a global community of online business people through
her weekly newsletter.
Susan recently finished a free report about adding automatic
content to your website that search engines can see. It's
available at:
http://www.friendswhocare.us/content.htm
