How do Search Engines rank a site?

When you search for a topic using a search engine, it will sort through millions of pages it has cataloged and return those that best match your search keywords. The system isn’t perfect however. You will notice that occasionaly, pages unrelated to your search will show up and it can sometimes be difficult to find exactly what you are looking for.

Search engines certain rules to decide which pages are the best relate to your search. These pages are matched mainly upon the frequency and location of the keywords you provided in that web page. More on Keywords Tag.

Most search engines also emphasize the TITLE tag of your web page. When searching for “Baseball Tickets”, the search engine first compares sites with “Baseball Tickets” in the Title Tag. More on Title Tag.

Search engines check if your search words are near the top of a web page, in a headline, and where they are located in the paragraphs of text. The Assumption is that any site that is a good match will have those search words near the beginning of the text or highlighted as headings. This is only part of search engine optimization services. More on headings.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are a very important part of a web page. Meta tags are used by many search engines (not all) to get information about websites. This information is put into a database by the search engine and is then used to determine if your site should appear for specific searches and how high up on the list it should rank. There most important Meta tags are Keywords, Description, and the Title tag.

Visitors to a site do not see the meta tags excepte the Title tag located at the top of their browser.

Why isn’t my site getting listed?
Below are some common search engine optimization reasons why your site isn’t getting listed:

* Hidden Text: Text too small or of the same color as the background color.
* Pages with off-topic or an spamming of keywords.
* Duplication of content: excessive submission of same page, same pages from different domains, or submitting the same page content from many hosts.
* Word Spamming. Repeating a word again and again again again again.
* No Text On Page
* Slow load time, site down, site unaccessable
* Site under construction and is incomplete.
* Splash or Doorway pages
* Pages containing AutoRefresh codes or Redirects
* Dynamic Pages that block Web crawlers.
* Pages that have the symbols in the URL: ampersand (&), percent sign (%), equals sign (=), dollar sign ($) or question mark (?). Many spiders do not recognize them.
* Pages that contain only links to other pages or domains.
* Hate Sites or Illegal Content

Are page layout & content important?

Yes, some search engines ignore meta tags completely and get all information from page layout and content. Even if a search engine still uses Meta tags, page layout and content has a strong influence over search engine positioning. For proper search engine optimization, your keywords must appear throughout the body content. Put them at the top, middle, and bottem. The most important keywords should be Headings. This places importance on them and some search engines use this when ranking.

The number of times a keyword appears on a page affects the ranking. Avoid writting the same word over and over as this is considered spamming an may cause the site to be ignored.
Are Headings important?
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Many Search Engines give a higher ranking to pages with text placed in certain areas of the web page and formatted a certain way. One example of this is a Header or Heading. A Header or Heading is large print or subtitles on a page. This is text placed at the top of your web page and formatted with header tags. Headings appear in various sizes and are controlled by the HTML tags <H1>, to <H6>. Below is the Heading code and sizes :

<H1>Insert header here</H1>

H1 Is This Size

H2 Is This Size

H3 Is This Size

H4 Is This Size

H5 Is This Size

H6 Is This Size

What is the description Meta Tag?

A Description Meta tag is text that shows up in most of the search engines below your website name. Try to provide the most important information about your company or site in 2 sentences or less. Make sure to use your most important keywords as early as possible in the sentences.

Here is what a properly written description should look like remembering our most important keyword and keyphrase is “paint” and “painting supplies”:

<meta name=”description” content=”Glass ornaments and sculptures provided by Benson Glass Company. Products include etched glass, crystal, blown glass, and more…”>
What is the Title Tag?
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Many consider the Title Tag the most important part of a web page. The Title tag appears at the very top of the browser. The title section usually has an important influence on the ranking of your site in search engines. Limit your web site title to no more than 100 letters and spaces. Your most important keyword should apperar as the first word(s) in your Title, Keyword, and Description Tags. This is a fundamental of search engine optimization services. Here is the code for the Title tag:

<TITLE>Insert Title here</TITLE>

How do I choose keywords?

In order to make a list of keywords, write down on a piece of paper single words or short phrases that you think others would use in a search engine to try to find your product or service. List 50 to 100 words or phrases.

For example, if your site is focused on Fishing Equipment. When someone uses “fishing equipment” as keywords in a search, you want your web page to be listed in the results towards the top. Each page should have different keywords that relate to that page’s specific content. For example, another page about “fish lures” should have “fish lures” included in that pages keywords.

List your keywords as phrases two or more words long. This will help distinguish your sites from the thousands of others with a single keyword. Instead of using keywords like “fishing, equipment” you should also use phrases like “fishing equipment”, “fishing supplies”, or “bright fish lures”.

The more important the keyword or phrase; the sooner it should be listed in the list of 50-100. All other keywords and phrases should be listed in the order of most important to least important. Do not right the same keyword over and over as this may be considered spamming and the site may be ignored. Also limit your keywords as some engines use a scoring method where it counts how often your keyword appears in proportion to the number of keywords.

Here is how your keywords should look:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”Glass, wholesale glass, art glass, etched glass, blown glass, glass ornament, cut glass, glass sculpture, decorative glass, crystal bell, handmade glass, angelfish, glass fish, dinner bell, genuine crystal, lead, decorative, pressed glass, glass design, etched glass, glass rose, gold-plated, glass dolphin, ice, carved glass, glass eagle, glass elephant, etc…”>

Be sure to use the plural of words when possible. For example: use hoses instead use hose. This way, people searching for either a hose or hoses will find you.

This tag is included in the image code when displaying images. Several words can be attached to the ALT area. The content of the ALT tag is seen when a use moves their mouse over the image that the ALT tag is assigned to. Many search engines consider the information in the ALT tag as regular text. This can help put important keywords near the top of the page without actually displaying it. The code for the Alt Tag is:

<IMG src=”http://imagehere.gif” ALT=”Keyword, keyword phrase etc”>

Google Search Engine criteria?

Reasons your site may not be included despite search engine optimization services.

Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index.

You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. We want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens.

Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user’s query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user’s query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame — because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page.

Additionally, Google does not like:

Hidden text or hidden links.
Stuffing pages with irrelevant keywords.

What is the keywords Meta Tag?
Keywords is a name for the terms people type into search engines when searching for something. For example, if you were looking for sites about Donald Duck, you would go to a search engine and type in the words “Donald Duck”. The search engine then searches it’s databases for sites that contain those words and then it displays a list of those sites. The Keyword tag is part of our search engine optimization services.