The first post was basically a simple introduction which as to what we are trying to achieve. This post will discuss factors which influence the way search engines relate keywords to their listings.
Perhaps the first point to make is that search engines live and die by providing results which are most relevant to the keywords people have used. So search engines send out spiders to scour the web and interpret the content of web pages in an attempt to make sense of the content of the gazillions of web pages in some type of ordered way. They then store this information and use it to create a listing of relevant web pages when people enter their keywords. It is generally accepted that there are two main sets of factors which influence the search engine’s interpretation of the content of web pages – They are commonly referred to as Off Page and On Page factors – The engineers who develop search engines also understand that the internet community is also a good arbiter of what is useful much of the time so they have added concepts of website popularity into the mix. In addition to this they filter the results to try and remove people attempting to distort the search engine results so people will visit their sites for some reason – usually to sell the something they weren’t really looking for – like porn gambling or pharmaceuticals. This is usually referred to as spamming the search engines.
On Page factors are contents of your web pages, not only the text, but the way pages are laid out bolding, italics, headings, lists, meta tags, the density or frequency of the particular words or phrases etc. These factors help tell the search engine what is the meaning of the page.
Off Page factors include the number of links pointing to your site, the type of site from which the links come from, referred to as the theme, the popularity of the page pointing to your site and the anchor text or alt tag associated with the link to your site. All these factors give an appraisal of your site which tells the search engine what its about and how relevant it is likely to be, from the perspective of external sites – presumably largely independent to yours (well that was the theory when they came up with the idea).
Filters commonly try fend off spammers and they are used for both on page and off page factors. It is generally thought there are filters for hidden text, keywords placed at too high a density on a page, stuffing meta tags with keywords and unrelated keywords also repeated title, description and meta tags on numerous pages. Over optimising filters like using too many H1 tags, too many bolded or italicized keywords, stuffing keywords into alt tags too many external or internal links with exactly the anchor text. Another recent filter is thought to be the sandbox
So as you can see that whilst it is important to let the search engines know what your site is about you should not over do it as that will harm your listing. When I say harm it is probably more the case that search engines don’t ban sites unless they are extreme cases or use more nefarious techniques like cloaking (this is for another post one day), it just probably ignores or down weights the value of these keywords on your site so you end up losing any value. There are numerous examples of spammy sites on the web begin present in the search engine indexes and examples where webmasters have made adjustments to keyword density and seen marked improvement in rankings. A good site to check optimal densities for on page factors is http://www.gorank.com/research/ this shows the latest averages for densities on page for a range of search engines. Its important to understand that these are averages and the acceptable range for most of these variables is much wider so don’t get too hung up on getting it right to the 5th decimal place.
What is the most important factor(s) – everything really theme your pages and your linking strategy but if I am forced to answer your linking strategy probably carries more weight.
