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WebPosition
Gold can generate page critics to give valuable advice on how
to optimize each of your web pages.
Below are
some of the topics covered in the page critics:
1. Factors
that Greatly Affect your Page's Relevancy
Nearly all
people on the Web visit search engines to find information or
Web sites. They enter keywords into the search line of these search
engines. Often they enter several keywords, or "phrases,"
to further refine their searches. Search engines are in the business
of sorting Web sites in their databases by the words they contain
that match a given search.
How well you incorporate important keywords into your Web site
consistent with each individual search engine's ranking criteria
will determine your Web site's rank. Since there could be thousands
of pages with that same keyword or phrase on it, it's important
that you rank near the top of the results to be found.
Generally,
each search engine assigns "points" to Web sites or
the submission someone made describing that Web site based on
some predefined criteria. While this ranking criteria may vary
from search engine to search engine, most "grade" the
page based on the following general rules
2. Areas of
a Page Explained
Since most
engines assign varying degrees of importance to the location of
your keywords on the page, the Page Critic breaks out statistics
such as frequency, total words, weight, and prominence by "Area."
These areas can only be seen when you view the HTML source code
for a page. The area will have a begin tag such as <TITLE>,
and an ending tag such as </TITLE>. The ending or closing
tag will always have the added slash character in it.
To view the
HTML coding for the page you're analyzing, click on the Page Editor
tab on the Page Critic form, or load the page into your favorite
HTML editor. With some editors, like Microsoft FrontPage, you'll
need to click on the HTML tab to view the actual tags behind the
WYSIWYG screen.
IMPORTANT
TIP: Use the Page Critic suggestions table first to improve your
rankings. For additional help, study the statistics in the Page
Analysis table. Your goal is to try and make your page have similar
statistics to those pages that already rank well. You can do this
by comparing your page to a specific page, a group of TOP ranking
pages, or to the TOP Averages for that engine. The comparison
options may be set on the second tab of the Page Critic screen.
Making your numbers "higher" than your competitors is
not always going to help. Most engines rank pages well that appear
within acceptable ranges. If you exceed their limits, you can
actually hurt your ranking rather than helping it.
3 Most times
keyword repeated in a row
If your page
had this in the title:
Come buy our
widgets, widgets, widgets, and more widgets!
Then this
property would contain a 2, which indicates the keyword widgets
was repeated 2 times in a row on the page. Although you can repeat
your keyword, you should avoid listing or repeating it multiple
times in a row. Some engines consider this as "spamming"
or "keyword stuffing" and will penalize your page's
score.
4. Page Critic Advice
The Page Critic
will analyze your HTML page and then make specific suggestions.
Although these suggestions are based on a great deal of research,
search engines can change their ranking algorithms at anytime.
Therefore,
if you feel any of the suggestions could be improved or should
be changed, then e-mail us at help@1stPlaceSoft.com. We will continue
to update our search engine knowledge bases and make them available
to you through subscription updates.
Many of the
Critic suggestions will include links to get further help or details.
Be sure to click on those links to further clarify any suggestions
given.
5. Why
Pages Can Sometimes Appear to Rank Well for No Reason
You do a search
for a keyword that applies to your site and a page pops up at
the top, or very near the top for no logical reason. In many cases,
the keyword searched cannot even be found on the page! Or at best,
the keyword is only there once, where your page has it many times,
yet still ranks lower. Stop banging your head against the wall,
and learn the various reasons why this happens and how you can
combat it to gain the advantage.
There are
many reasons for why the above scenario can occur. We'll list
and discuss each:
1. Out of
date pages: A Webmaster can change the content of a page at anytime
and re-post it to his site. Unfortunately, unless the page is
resubmitted, the search engine may not know to update its database
for quite some time. Even when the Webmaster resubmits, some engines
take weeks before they get around to re-visiting the page.
What can be
done in this scenario? Go to the engine's submit URL page and
suggest they re-index that page. If this is the problem, the engine
should drop it in rank as soon as it visits the page. On the slow
indexing engines, you may have to wait awhile, but it should accelerate
the process.
2. Spoofing
or the "Switcheroo" technique: Some unsavory Internet
marketers create a server side script that will watch for a list
of known search engine Spiders. When they see one, they "serve
up" a very ugly page that is highly optimized to rank well.
The page can
rank better than most pages because they are not concerned about
how it looks to the average user. When anyone besides a search
engine visits the page, the site serves up a very "pretty"
page, which may not even contain the keyword on it at all!
Obviously
we strongly object to this technique since it can serve up pages
to the searcher which don't even apply to the search, undermining
the search engine's value. Optimizing your page to apply to a
search based on its real content is one thing, but "spoofing"
is simply bad business, and is against the rules.
The good news
is some of the search engines are now using a technique that we
won't disclose, that catches these guys and bans their entire
site. However, we don't think they've come close to catching them
all yet. If you run into a page where you think this may be happening,
you can report it to the engine, and if you're lucky, they will
investigate it.
3. New ranking
algorithm: Search engines change their ranking algorithm from
time to time. Some techniques that worked well before, may be
penalized now. When this happens, sometimes the engine takes awhile
before they bother to re-index their entire database under the
new "rules." Until that happens, some older pages may
continue to rank high, even though your submission emulating them
in nearly every way refuses to score well.
In this case,
the solution again, is to submit the page, which should apply
the "new" rules to it, and score it under the current
relevancy system.
4. Popularity
factor: Some pages may have the keyword once or twice, but certainly
aren't using all the tips and tricks to deserve such a high ranking.
This can be very frustrating to those of us reaching for the "brass
ring" and seeing it go to a seemly undeserving page.
An explanation
can sometimes be attributed to the popularity factor. If the site
has lots of links to it, then some engines will score the page
higher because it would seem to be "popular," and theoretically,
have better content. To determine if this is a possible reason
why a page scores high, you'll need to do a "Links to URL"
search. The Page Critic will display a link to do this search
for you on engines that support them.
The popularity
factor is yet another reason to spend part of your marketing time
soliciting links, or link exchanges with other sites. We're not
entirely certain whether you get any extra "bonus" for
having lots of links to your domain, or whether it must be to
the specific page. I suspect it is only for the number of links
to the specific page, but if you have an opinion, let me know.
5. Search
Engine Bugs: Yes, even the big commercial search engines have
bugs. Since they are continually trying to fine tune their system
to provide better results, or to get rid of abusers of the system,
bugs can easily make their way into the database. Sometimes it
may be fixed the next day, or in other cases it may score pages
incorrectly or poorly for quite some time.
About all
you can do in this situation is to complain to the engine that
xyz pages rank high on xyz search, when they really don't apply
to the search. The "smart" search engines will listen
to your polite but firm complaint, and look into why the search
results were so poor. If people don't find what they expect, they're
going to go off to another engine to do their searches. Search
engines don't want that because they make their money on advertising
to those visitors, and need them to return to their engine, rather
than to their competitor. Considering writing your letter from
the perspective of the researcher doing a search and finding irrelevant
results in their engine. Keep in mind the search engines strive
to serve the average user, but they aren't in business to guarantee
YOU any particular ranking.
6. The Page
is simply Optimized: Often the reason a page ranks high is it
simply fits the criteria that a search engine is looking for.
Their algorithms
are fairly sophisticated so sometimes it takes a second look and
some background information to understand why a page is positioned
where it is. Luckily, this is what the Page Critic does for you.
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