4. How do Search Engines Rank Pages?

There is no one that can guarantee you top positioning on any search engine. Each search engine uses its own critera as to what it likes when cataloguing the content of a particular web page. Some engines look at your metatags, others look at keyword density. Attached an overview of what some search engines think of as important.

Search Engine	Content and location	HTML Title	Meta tags	Keyword Density	Link popularity	Summary
AltaVista Search Engine	Keywords that appear at the top of the page are given higher priority	Very important, should be different for every page	AltaVista likes the use of the Meta Description tag and Title Tag	Important	Important	keywords in title, description metatag, keywords appearing at the top of the page and keywords close together.
Open Directory Project (powers alltheweb, AltaVista, Gigablast, Google, HotBot, Lycos, Teoma, WiseNut)	Editors determine if your site gets listed in the directory.	Important. Make sure the title is short and describes what the website is all about.	Description and keywords filled in are important.	No	Not important for DMOZ, but is Important, for some of its partners, who use Inktomi	Make sure your title and description are accurate and precise and is the same as on the website and pick approriate category.
Google Search Engine	Keywords should be close to each other. Content should include keywords in text or links	Keyword or keyword phrase should be in title	The Meta description tag often appears in search results and is an important tag.	Not mentioned	Very important, especially from popular websites.	Link popularity, keywords near each other, keywords in title and link text, themes, bold and large fonts.
Inktomi	Keywords should appear at top of page and in the content.	Very important	Very important, both description and keywords	Very important (standard requirements are 3-7%)	Site linkage is very Important	Keyword density and site linkage are most important.
MSN Search Engine	Important. Place descriptive content at top of page	Important, should contain keywords	The meta description and keywords tag often appear in search results and are important	Important	Important	Web page content, the number and quality of websites that link to your website, and the relevance of your website’s content to keywords are most important.
Yahoo Directory	Editors determine if your site gets listed in the directory.	Imortant	Description and keywords filled in play a role.	No	No information	Make sure your title and description are accurate and precise and is the same as on the website and pick approriate category.
Search Engine	Content and location	HTML Title	Meta tags	Keyword Density	Link popularity	Summary

5. What are Popular Directories & Indexes?

There are a few directories who are top providers of traffic to websites, and for this reason they are important for a search strategy. The main ones are dmoz.org and the yahoo directory.

6. How to improve Search Engine Placement?

There are several basic steps you can take that can greatly improve your site's chances of ranking high in search engine. Come up with a good title, make sure your website is optimized for your best three keyword/keyword phrases, optimize your metatags, make sure you work on good content and your keyword density, and avoid html errors.

Getting a high ranking in major search engines is something that can often be achieved by putting in a lot of hard work and "love for the game". It's not just about optimising your website as best as you can but it's a mix of hundreds of variables. Once you have achieved a good ranking, the problem becomes how to stay on top, as your website is competing with thousands of others.

Basically, as of this point it will be going through the same steps over and over again until you get some satisfying results.

First of all, make sure your website is registered with the engines you care about. Visit the search engine and search for your url. If you're not registered keep trying as it may take several submissions before you get registered.

Another thing you have to do is to track the visitors to your website. There are many stats and tracking programs that can help you with this. These statistics will give you a lot of valuable information such as what keywords people used to find your site, which search engines referred them? What pages they visited? This information will help you determine whether or not you have optimised your website for the right keywords and phrases, or if you need to change things around.

Also keep the content on your website fresh. Update regularly with new information to encourage visitors to come back to your website.

Keep in mind that all search engines rank your website differently and use different algorithms. The above overview will give you some idea.

7. What are Metatags?

A little bit more on Metatags. First of all you use metatags as part of your HTML code when you build your Web site. When search engines index your site the metatags and keywords tell the search engine what your website is all about and what information to display in the browser when someone does a search.

Your html code, including Metatags, Title Tag and Keyword Tag, will look like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Title of your website</title>
<meta http-equip="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta name="description" content="description of your website">
<meta name="keywords" content="your most important keywords">
</head>
<body>Viewable content of your website</body>
</html>

Optimizing your title tag:

<title></title>
The TITLE tag of your page is a very important factor when optimising your web page for the search engines. The TITLE tag is displayed in the browser's title bar and it's very important to put important keywords in your TITLE metatag.

Your TITLE tag should be below the <HEAD> tag and should contain your most important keywords. I recommend your TITLE tag to be around 60 characters long. If you have more than 60 characters the TITLE tag may be cut off by some search engines. Try to place some important keywords at the beginning of the tag, especially when you have more than 60 characters.

Optimizing your description metatag:

<meta name="description" content="All about your website">
The DESCRIPTION Metatag is also read by browsers and displayed in the search results and is therefore another important Tag when optimising your website. The DESCRIPTION meta tag describes what's on your web page to search engines and your most important keyword phrases should appear once in this description. Try to create a DESCRIPTION tag with no more than 150 characters.

Optimizing your keywords metatag:

<meta name="Keywords" Content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3">
Enter your most important keywords and keyword phrases in this tag but make sure these words also show up in the body of your site. Don't repeat the same keyword/keyword phrase more than 3 times as some engines may view repetition as spamming and can penalise you for it. Limit your KEYWORD tag to about 12 words or about 500 characters.

Optimizing your img alt tag:

<img src="agnitiologo.gif" width="10" height="10" alt="isp ottawa canada">. You can place your important keywords or a sentence in the ALT attribute of the image tag. The Image ALT tag is not very important these days to search engines but it can't harm using them.

Note:

• Your <title> tag should be around 60 characters and should contain your most important keyword phrases.
• Your <meta http> character set. It's now recommended to use this tag as browsers and robots use the tag how to translate the bytes in the document into characters on the screen. For more information visit: http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.html
• Your <meta description> tag should be around 150 characters and again you want to place your most important keyword phrases here. Many engines look at this tag, although Google ignores it and will create it's own description.
• Your <meta keywords> tag should contain about 12 words or 500 characters. Enter your most important keywords and keyword phrases in this tag but make sure these words also show up in the body of your site. Don't repeat the same keyword/keyword phrase more than 3 times. Although this metatag is still useful, more and more crawlers are ignoring it.

There are some Metatag builder tools out there if you need some help:

Submit Corner - Metatag Generator
AddMe - Metatags Generator
ScrubTheWeb METATAG builder tool

8. How to pick the right keywords?

Choosing the right keywords is essential. Your metatags and the content of your site will be optimised for those keywords. Try to think of 3 main keyword phrases that relate to your website and do your research. Try to be specific when you pick your 3 keyword phrases as you will get more targeted traffic the more specific you are. When you pick very general keywords you'll have to compete with thousands of other websites. Once you have picked your three keyword phrases, type them into a search engine and see what comes up. Analyse what the competition has done.

Use a keyword tool to help you determine which terms are most important and most used by people looking for a website like yours. I have included a few links to keyword tools which can assist you in determining the most relevant keywords for your website.

1. WordTracker
2. Overture Keyword Tool

9. What is content and keyword density?

The content of your website is as important as your title tag and optimising the content and the keyword density is one of the best things you can do to improve search engine ranking. Search engines love text so if you can, try to create pages with lots of text and don't forget to include your important keyword phrases. In general try to have between 100 and 250 words on every page you submit to the engines. This amount of words will also help the search engines understand what the page is all about and your site will have an advantage over other sites with less content when it comes to ranking.

Keyword density is the ratio of the search phrase to the total number of words in the page. Again you want to focus on your most important keyword phrases and have a keyword density ratio of around 5%. There are many keyword density tools out there which can help you determine keyword density on your site and can help improve keyword density ratios.

Keep in mind that search engines calculate keyword density ratios differenty. Google for example does not include the metatag when calculating the ratio but other search engines such as inktomi powered engines do inlcude metatags.