Search Engine Rankings

A search engine will visit your website, usually using automatic software called a spider. (The software crawls around the World Wide Web just like a spider around a web. Get it?) It records every word in your website, with some limitations. The search engine then indexes all words from your site and scores them based on how often they appear on the page, how close they are to the top of the page, whether or not they appear in headings or titles, etc.

When a visitor conducts a search for a word that appears in your site, the search engine ranks each page of your site based on how the score for that word compares to all other pages in the search engine index. (It is that simple in concept only.)

Your Challenge

Your challenge is predicting what words and phrases a prospective visitor to your website might use in a search. Then you want to use those words as often and as prominently as possible. But you can’t overload your page with the same keywords and key phrases, the search engines today are just too smart. In fact, if a search engine thinks you are unreasonably trying to inflate your ranking, it just may ban your website from its listings… Forever!

Your next step is your first follow-up. Here you first learn the value of patience in this process. Wait 2-4 months, to allow the search engines to visit and index your site, then go to each engine and conduct searches using the keywords you initially identified. For each key word or phrase, keep records of your site's ranking for each phrase.

When you know how your site ranks, engine-by-engine and keyword-by-keyword, you can modify your site to improve your rankings. Re-write your copy for the target pages taking care to use the key word or phrase more often and more prominently. Then re-submit those pages to the target search engine, wait 4 - 6 weeks and query that search engine to learn your new rankings.

Neverending Story

This process never stops if you want to optimize your rankings. Every time you move up one position you displace a competitor. When you do, they will likely react and try to regain their position. If you are in business you are already used to this. It’s called competition. This competition never ends. Things change, stuff happens and your rankings will slowly deteriorate without adequate care and feeding. Welcome to the world of search engine positioning where tenacity and perservance are your greatest assets.

Now you know you must pepper your website content with keyword phrases, then follow-up to determine your search engine rankings. That is a non-trivial effort.

There's still more. You can monitor traffic to your website and determine if you have predicted the correct key words and phrases. Your web-hosting provider should offer access to your site activity logs. These are computer files that record a variety of data about the visitors to your site. They can tell you which (if any) of the search engines are referring (sending) visitors to your site. Even better, they can tell you what words and phrases those visitors used in their search.

Fine Tuning

The first thing you learn is how accurately you predicted what those search phrases would be. It’s likely you hit some and missed others. Now you can start fine-tuning. If a certain search engine is sending visitors based on the term “yellow submarine” you may want to review your site content and see how prevalent that phrase is. You might rewrite your site content to increase the frequency of use for that phrase and give it more prominent positioning.

Another Tradeoff

Beware: Every time you increase the frequency and prominence of one word or phrase you decrease the same for all your other key words. There is always a tradeoff.