Keys to Increase Your Website Search Engine Ranking
by: Peter Tarrida del Marmol
When we are talking about search engine ranking, the first thing you need to think about is the market place. Many people ask themselves, how many keywords should I put in my anchor text? What is the keyword density that I should have on my page? Should I use 300 words on my copy or should I use 500 words? Can I use flash? How many keywords should I put in my "alt" text? Etc...
Here is a general statement: magic numbers do not exist. The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is the following: algorithms change. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a search phrase in a search engine, something could change, and you might have to spend months or years trying to find out the engineering of the algorithm again.
It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm and do something much easier instead, observe your competitors. All you need to do is to understand what elements are your competitors using that are making them rank on the top positions.
Let's see what those things are:
- Number and quality of inbound links pointing to your site
- Keyword density
- Fresh content
The first thing to observe from your competitor's sites is their back link index. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and type: "link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com". But it would be a mistake to do this only on Google, as Google discriminates sites much more than other search engines. Yahoo and MSN are much more accurate for measuring the back link index.
Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think on what is the category where those links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.
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Keys to Increase Your Website Search Engine Ranking
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