|
 On-the-page factors considered by Google
Now that we've examinded the off-the-page factors that have primary importance for Google, let's now take a look into on-the-page factors that you should page attention to before submitting to Google. There are certain reasons to believe Google still considers the META keyword tag for counting relevancy. While your META description tag contents can be used by Google as the description of your site in the search results, the META description does not have any influence for relevancy count.
When you're targeting Google, be sure to use your keywords in the following: - Your domain name – important!
- First words of the TITLE tag; HTML heading tags H1 to H6;
- ALT text as long as you also describe the image;
- Quality content on your index page. Try to make the length of your home page at least 300 words, however, without hiding anything from visitors' eyes (VERY IMPORTANT!).
- Link text for outgoing links.
- Drop-down form boxes created with the help of the SELECT tag.
- Finally, try to use some keywords in BOLD .
Also, try to center your pages around one central theme. Use synonyms of your important keyword phrases. Keep everything on the page on that ONE main topic, and provide good, solid content. Pages that are optimized for Google will score best when there are at least a few links to outside sites that are related to your topic, because this establishes your page's reputation as an authority. Google also measures how many Web sites outside your domain have links pointing to your site and factor in an "importance rating" for each of those referring sites. The more popular a site appears to a search engine, the higher up in the search listings they will place it. According to Craig Silverstein with Google, "External links that you grant from a particular page on your Web site can become diluted. In other words, if you place 10,000 links to other Web pages from a particular page of your Web site, each link is less powerful than if you were to link to only five other Web pages. Or, the contribution value to another Web site of each individual link is weakened the more you grant." Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com) You can submit your URL to Yahoo! Search for free here: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (note: you need to register at their portal first) and it will be indexed in about 1-2 months. Yahoo! is still the most popular site on the web, according to its traffic rank reported by Alexa (www.alexa.com). Nevertheless, in terms of the number of searches performed Google carries the day. Yahoo! provides results in a number of ways. First, it has one of the most complete directories on the Web. However, there's also Yahoo! Search, which lists results in a way similar to other crawler-based engines. Here, in the section of crawler-based engines, we deal with the second one. Sponsored results from Overture are found at the top, side, and bottom of the search results pages fed by Yahoo!. Yahoo! now owns Overture's pay engine and provides search results to AltaVista, AllTheWeb, MSN , Overture's supplemental results, and other Inktomi-powered engines such as HotBot. The search results at Yahoo! changed in February 2004. For the previous couple of years, Google was their search results supplier. Nowadays, Yahoo! is basically using Inktomi's database. Hence Yahoo! has bought some engines that earlier had pioneered the search world, Yahoo! Search officially provides all search engines acquired through these acquisitions with its own results. Therefore, when you optimize your Web pages for Yahoo!, you have a good chance of appearing in the top results of other popular search engines, such as AllTheWeb and AltaVista. When Yahoo! launched their own results (independent of Google), they claimed that they did not use Inktomi to supply them. However, the fact is that they are using Inktomi as their major crawling algorithm. They have actually just re-named Inktomi's spider, but it's coming from the same IP addresses as before. To find out if Yahoo's spider has visited your site, search the following information in your server logs. Their crawler is now called Yahoo Slurp (formerly, it was just Slurp). It's IP address will be something like this - 66.196.xxx.xxx. It will appear as xxxx.inktomisearch.com and its user agent will show as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp). To rank well in Yahoo, you need to do the same things that help your rankings in Google. Off-the-page factors (link popularity, anchor text etc) are very important. Some experts consider it easier to rank well on Yahoo because your own internal links are more important and also there appears to be no requirement for link relevancy. Whereas Google claims that the Page Rank of the relevant linking sites is worth more than the Page Rank of the irrelevant sites, links don't need to be relevant to do well on Yahoo. Like all other search engines, they'll list you for free if you get links to your site. Much like Google, their crawler is very active and updates listings on a daily basis. However, it can take a few weeks for Yahoo to list new pages after they have found and crawled it through referring links. The pages that have already been included in the listing are updated much more often, usually every several days. In March 2004, Yahoo launched its paid inclusion program called Site Match (Site Match is entirely handled by Overture which is owned by Yahoo!). You can find out details about Yahoo's paid inclusion program here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php and the pricing here - http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/sse_pr.php?mkt=us Site Match guarantees your site will appear in the results of the top US search properties: MSN , Yahoo!, AltaVista, InfoSpace, AlltheWeb, NetZero, and CNN. Let's get a brief insight into the factors on your pages that will help you rank better in Yahoo: Use keywords in your domain name; Use keywords in the TITLE tag and META Description tag. Your title must include your most important keyword phrase once toward the beginning of the tag. Don't split your important keyword phrase in your title! META Keywords and META Description tags. The Yahoo! family of search engines DO consider META tags when estimating relevancy. In META Keywords, only use your most important keyword phrase, a secondary keyword phrase, and a few synonyms in this tag. Use maybe 5-10 keyword phrases in the tag at the most. For META Description, the maximum number of characters is approximately 350, including spaces. Don't split your important keyword phrase in your description! Don't waste space in META description using the words like "the" and "and". Do not include numbers or brand names in the description. Don't use all caps, and don't capitalize the first letter of each word. The description should be a concise representation of what the site offers. In the case of business or commercial sites, it is simply a description of what the company does or of the product(s) it offers. Yahoo! may not use a description at all for commercial sites. Use keywords in heading tags H1 through H6; Use keywords in link anchor text and ALT attributes of your images; Body main content and page names (URLs) need to have keywords in them too; recommended keyword weight in the BODY tag for Yahoo is 5%, maximum 8%. A catalog page with lots of links, for instance a site map, will help a lot for your indexing and ranking by Yahoo!. You can submit only the main page to Yahoo!, and let its spider find, crawl, and index the rest of your pages. If it doesn't find an important page, however, make sure you submit it manually. Like with all of the other engines, a solid and legitimate link popularity is considered important by Yahoo's spider as a ranking factor. Yahoo! fowns upon having satellite sites that revolve around the theme of a main site. For example, if you sell office furniture and set up a main company site and then plant several satellite sites for each kind of furniture you sell, it may seem suspicious to Yahoo!. So, make sure that each site is a stand alone site and serves a unique purpose, and that it's valuable to both the search engines and your users. Yahoo! does not read the HTML comments as some other search engines do. As with any other search engine it is vitally important for Yahoo! That you create valuable content for your search visitors. MSN (www.msn.com) You can submit your site to MSN for free at http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx, however they are sure to find it without your submission if you are listed in Overture, Yahoo! Search, or have links from sites listed there. MSN stands for Microsoft Network and was initially meant to be the Microsoft's solution for Web search, among other goals. Nevertheless, it was powered by Inktomi's results and did not have its own crawler. Since February 2005, MSN has switched to Yahoo's result base and introduced its own Web crawler. MSN is one of the most popular of world-class search engines, with around 16% of all search traffic. It definitely makes sense targeting the top of MSN's search listings as the amount of traffic you will receive as a result is considerable. However, with the MSN search it's especially important to avoid spam methods since they claim to use a sophisticated series of technologies to fight even potential spammers. PC magazine has published an article that states: "Spammers are increasingly trying to weasel their way into search engine results, and Microsoft hopes that filtering them out can be one area where its tool can outshine Google's." For more information on this article, visit http://www.pcmag.co.uk/news/1155758. As the MSN search technology is still very young, the information about its spider's behavior is very sparse. The corresponding SE research is currently in progress at WebUniver and this course will be updated with the results as soon as they appear. The information for finding the MSN spider in your server visit logs is as follows: The Spider's name is MSNBot, with the IP addresses 207.68.xx.xx and 65.64.xx.xx , host msnbot.msn.com, and user agent "msnbot/1.0 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)". At this stage, the general rules of optimizing for MSN could be formulated similar to the optimization rules for other search engines. Get your site listed in the directories, obtain a solid and quality link popularity, balance your keyword theme. You may also consider purchasing an ad from MSN or Overture to get listed in the sponsored results. MSN equally treats both off-the-page and on-the-page factors when ranking the pages.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed