Search Engine Ranking: The Real Truth

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There are perhaps more myths and urban legends abouthow to get your website ranked well on the ...
than any other subject on the ... Inthis article, I'm going to tell you how you can t There are perhaps more myths and urban legends abouthow to get your website ranked well on the searchengines than any other subject on the Internet.
Inthis article, I'm going to tell you how you can tellthe fact from the fiction. After reading thisarticle, you will know how to get the current factsabout how any search engine ranks sites.It is tempting to go to the various newsgroups,mailing lists and discussion forums that arefrequented by webmasters to ask questions aboutsearch engine ranking.
Many of you have done thisand been bewildered by the amount and diversity ofadvice offered. Some claim that you should usewhite-on-white text to stuff your page with keywordswhile others claim using white-on-white hidden textwill get you banned.
Some say to use keywords inyour keywords meta-tag while others claim thatsearch engines don't even look at the meta-tagsanymore. Some claim that you must use short pages,while others claim that long pages are better.In almost every case, you will receive massivelycontradictory advice if you ask other webmasters.Even worse, sometimes almost all of the webmasterswill agree on some topic...
and be dead wrong.Sometimes the information is exactly right forFebruary, 1999 but is no longer accurate. Searchengines change their ranking algorithms constantly.So how can you find the correct information? First,let me say that I rarely worry about the searchengines at all anymore.
There really are much moreeffective means of driving traffic to your site thanworrying about the search engines. I recommend linkexchanges with sites of a similar topic to your ownand submitting articles to newsletters in yourcategory as much more effective means of marketingthan worrying about search engines.
You should alsobe aware that search engines keep a "blacklist" ofsites they have manually banned, often because theowners bragged about some particular ranking attainedin some particular way. So, once you use thefollowing methods, I recommend that you keep specificresults to yourself.
So let's dive into how to getthe search engine secrets.Why not ask the search engines themselves? Of course,all of the search engines claim to guard theirranking secrets with great care, but that is actuallyquite impossible. By it's very nature, every singlesearch engine has a publicly available database.
Allyou have to do to access their database is to enter asearch term. The search engine will happily tell youall of the information you need to know about how itranks sites.
All it takes is a little analysis ofthe results.Since a course in statistical analysis would bereally boring in a newsletter article (and not veryuseful), I'll skip all of the theory and get down toan actual example of how you can find the answer toalmost any question you have about search engineranking. Let's take an example step-by-step.
Let'ssay you just heard a rumor that a particular searchengine will rank you higher if your search term ispresent in the title. Here are the steps you cantake to find out if that is true:1.
Pick twenty popular search terms.2. Enter them at the selected search engine.3.
Review the first twenty results for each searchand write down the answer. Write a 1 if the answerto your question is true for that listing and a 0if it is false.4.
If the answers are all the same (either true orfalse), you may need to use more than twenty resultsfor your study. If so, be consistent with allsearch terms.5.
If the answers for the second half of your resultsfor all search terms is zero, you may need to includesome more search terms until you have a non-zeroresult in the second half of your results.6. Total the answers for all search terms for thefirst half of your results.
Separately total theanswers for all of your search terms for the secondhalf of your results.7. Divide the total from first half of your resultsby the total of the second half of your results.8.
If your answer is very close to the number 1, thenyou will need to expand your search to more thantwenty popular search terms... or review more thanthe top 20 results...
or possibly accept that theanswer to your question is that this particularfactor is not very important to this search engineeither way (positive or negative).9. If your answer is significantly more than 1, thenthe answer to your question is true.10.
If your answer is significantly less than 1,then the answer to your question is false.If your question is regarding the formation of thetitle, description, domain name or URL, this methodis all you need. If your question regards somethingabout the underlying sites (ie: keyword density, useof header tags, hidden text, etc), then you may haveto visit each site listed in order to answer yourquestion.I find it easier to turn each question into atrue/false question, but you can also use this methodwith questions that have a numerical answer.Now the real challenge is finding the questions, notthe answers.
Recently a popular search enginestarted ranking sites with dead links lower thansites that quickly removed their dead links. Thisbecame obvious when the above study was performed.The challenge was to come up with the question: Dodead links on your site hurt search engine ranking?Feel free to drop me a note [email protected] with any interestingfinds using this method.
Happy hunting! Article Tags: Search Engine, Others Claim, Search Engines, Popular Search, Second Half, Search Terms Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .