Today's webmaster faces a very common yet disturbing problem:
getting a good position on the major search engines. How many
times have you ever wondered why, no matter what you do, you
can't seem to find your site when you do a search for your
keywords on Hotbot or Altavista? And you know, therefore, that
no one else is finding your site and you are missing out on
heaps of traffic. It is a very frustrating feeling common to
webmasters.
According to the 1999 NEC Research Institute report, the Web has
over 800 million pages and most major engines only index about
10 per cent of that. To make matters worse, just getting indexed
doesn't mean much unless you get indexed and ranked highly for
your search terms. That's because most people never bother drill
down beyond the first 30 links returned on a search.
The good news is that you can tune up your pages to get that top
ranking. It is all a matter of careful analysis of the current
top ranking pages to figure out what text proportions and
arrangements you need to use on your pages for them to get that
same high rank. It is that simple, and many professional
webmasters employ this technique very successfully.
The first step is to analyse the pages that are currently
ranking at the top of searches for keywords related to your
business. Search engines look at almost all parts of a web page
to calculate its rank. The title, meta tags, body text, links in
the page, alt tags, comments, form hidden fields and headings
all usually count. By looking at the exact number of words and
keywords in each of these sections in a page that currently
ranks highly, then applying those statistics to your own pages,
you stand a very high chance of getting a similar high rank. You
may not get the exact same rank, primarily because search
engines also use some other factors such as a page's popularity
to adjust their ranking scores. But you will still get a very
good rank near the page that you analysed.
What you would need to do would be to do a search on a keyword
or phrase in a search engine. See what page ranks highest for
that keyword or phrase. Make sure that the actual page is the
same one displayed in the search results and not a redirected
page or a newer page. You do this by comparing the file date,
file size, and the wording on the title and description as they
are on the search engine results and on the actual page. If it
isn't the same page that was indexed, move on to the next
highest-ranking page. The search engines do not always have the
most recent copy of a page on their index. For example, the
engine may have indexed a page on, say, June 12, 1998, and that
page ranked 2 on your search. However, that page may have been
changed, perhaps extensively, by its webmaster after that
indexing was done, on maybe July 1, 1998. But that change may
not be indexed yet because the engine would revisit that page
maybe 2 months later. So if you were doing your search and
analysis on June 25, 1998, you would get the old version
appearing as a top ranking page, but when you click on to it,
you would retrieve the new version of the page. The problem is
that it is most likely that the new version would not have the
same ranking as the old one! So if you take its statistics and
use them, your pages will rank poorly. What you should do always
is look a little closer at the information you get from your
search results. Many engines provide extra information about
each page on their results list such as file size. Look at the
reported file size on the search result, then go on to the
actual page and see whether the file size is just about the
same. On Internet Explorer, you do so by right-clicking on the
page and choosing the Properties menu item from the popup menu.
Another way of finding out is seeing whether there are any
differences in the title and description of the page on the
search engine results and on the actual page itself. Most
engines use the page title as the title of the search listing,
and the meta description or first few words on a page as the
description on the results. You might find, for example, that
the title on the search result reads 'Super Real Estate Page'
and on the actual page it reads 'A Big Super Real Estate Page',
meaning that the page currently available is a modified version
of the one that was originally indexed at by the search engine.
Meticulously inspect the top ranking page, counting the total
words and keyword frequencies on each element of the page. Some
elements may be missing; some pages may not have meta tags.
Don't worry about that because sometimes an engine may actually
give a page a higher rank without the meta tags. One easy and
fast way of analysing these pages is by using a software package
designed for that. Three such packages are the GRSoftware
Keyword Density Analyzer, WebPosition Page Analyzer and
PositionWeaver PRO. Use the exact word counts and keyword
frequencies found on the top ranking pages. You may be tempted
to add or reduce from the word count or frequency a little, but
do not do that. That may actually cause your page to rank poorly
since it may not pass the fine mathematical margins that engines
set.
The next step is to edit your current pages or make new ones
that have these exact same statistics. For example, if your
current home page has a title that is 17 words long and has your
keyword appearing 4 times, and your research indicates that the
top-ranking page has a title 8 words long with the keyword
appearing once at the beginning of the title, then change your
home page that way. Do the same for all the other elements. You
can also use software such as PositionWeaver or a database
software or script if you can create one to build new pages with
these statistics.
Once that is done, the final step is to submit your home page
and wait. If you did your job correctly, then in a few days or
weeks (sometimes the engines take a while to index) you will see
some very encouraging increases on your site traffic. And with
the high popularity that the top search engines enjoy, the
rewards are very much worth all this effort.
About the author:
David Gikandi (support@positionweaver.com) is CEO at
SearchPositioning.com (http://www.positionweaver.com).
