How does web traffic reflect your web site rank?

Traffic has a direct impact to your web site’s rank among Google search results. The higher the rank, the more traffic you get. There are specific algorithms that Google and other search engines use to rank web sites, which are secretly guarded. Google uses over 200 ranking factors. SEO involves tailoring your website to ranking criteria.

Ranking algorithms is the part of the search engine that decides which pages show up at the top of the results list. Organic ranking is complicated. Ranking algorithm is the mathematical formula a search engine uses to score page against the query to see which pages are the closest matches.

The two main factors are page factors and query factors.

Page factors- Web search ranking algorithms rely heavily on components that have nothing to do with query entered.
1. Strength of links to a page
2. Number of visits to the page and more
These factors boost the rankings for searches on any word that occurs on that page.

Query Factors – The query that the search enters weighs heavily. The number of occurrences of words in the query, where they are found on the page, title, and body. Other elements are weighed in the search engines regarding rankings.

The ALT tag is designed to help visually impaired visitors to determine what the images contain, by allowing you to specify some alternative text. When a visitor points the mouse over an image with the alt tag, the text is shown. Search engines have the same problem as visually impaired users have, they cannot see the images. Images have no meaning to search engines. Search engines can only see the image tag’s text. Therefore it is of vital importance that you tag the images on your with their content.

Today is our second post on SEO Marketing Tips. We are going to discuss two important aspects of any Search Engine Optimization campaign: Tags and Titles.

When your computer views a webpage, there is data that you cannot see that tells the computer how the page should be displayed. All of the code that you cannot see is called tags. Tags are useful to a Search Engine Marketer, because the search engine uses tags to determine what content is more important than others. For example, an html page uses tags to make headers look big. A search engine can “see” that these headers are bigger, and therefore determines that the content inside the header gives more accurate information about the page than just the content.

There is a set of tags that do not determine the look or the layout of the page, but rather give data and information about the page to Search Engines and browsers. These tags are called metatags. Metatags are the most important type of tags to a Search Engine Marketer. Let’s talk about why.

The title tag is the most important metatag of all. You see the title tag every time you open up a browser page. The title tag is what is displayed at the top of the browser window. The title tag is also what is displayed in a search engine when someone searches for your page. Search engines give title tags more bearing than any other tags when it comes to determining the content of the page. When picking a page title, you must create a good balance between ranking effectiveness, or crafting the title for a search engine, and referral effectiveness, or giving a user not only information about your page, but a call to action. The table below shows some examples of titles and their effectiveness.

Ellipses (…) indicates estimate truncation point onscreen.

–Taken From Search Engine Marketing, Inc. Second Edition, IBM Press

As you can see, there are many choices for a page title, both bad and good. When choosing a title, there are certain things to keep in mind.

• That the title has both keywords and a call to action.
• That the title is between 40-65 characters
• That important words are in the title before the truncation point.

Besides the title tag, there are other important tags. We are going to discuss the description tag, and the keywords tag.

The description tag gives the search engine a small bit of information about your site/page. Many times descriptions aren’t given much weight, however in Google, descriptions are displayed under the result, so it is a good idea to ensure your description is appealing to people, and gives them a reason to click on your link.

The keywords tag used to be extremely important in SEO, but because of the way it was abused by marketers, most search engines all but ignore it. It does not hurt to have keywords, but it shouldn’t take up the majority of your time for the SEO campaign. Ensure that the keywords are relevant, and that you don’t have too many of them.

This wraps up our post about titles and tags. Stay tuned for the third and final post in this series: SEO Marketing Part 3: Navigation, Categorization, Linking.

Our first post is going to be the ever-so-popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing tips. First off, you should know that Search Engine Optimization may not work. I know there are tons of organizations promising top rankings, key placement, etc, etc. You should know however that even if you are at the top of the organic (normal search results) listings, it does not guarantee more sales. That’s why our first SEO post is going to be about content. I know you may have been expecting information about keywords, key phrases, metatags, etc, but in my experience good Seach Engine Optimization begins with good content.

In short, content that pleases search engine users, and fulfills and information need or prompts them to purchase something, is good. Content that’s highly optimized for search engine algorithms, but fails to satisfy search engine users, is virtually doomed to a fate of obscurity.

First off, you should know that most search engines look intently at the first paragraph of any given page, and then kind of skim over the rest of the content. That’s why you have to make sure that your first paragraph is top notch.

NOTE: Search engines normally determine the first paragraph by the first <p>, or paragraph tag.

The first step in writing good content is to come up with good keywords and key phrases. The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. To find the optimal phrases to optimize for, use research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker or Google’s Keyword Tool. Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation,” as they are rarely (if ever) indicative of what your site is really about. In future posts I will go more in depth on choosing keywords and key phrases, so stay tuned!

Now that you have a list of good keywords, you must put them into well written copy. This is a crucial component to having a successful website. The search engines need to read keyword-rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site. This copy shouldn’t be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor. Understand that there is no magical number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy. The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn’t going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

This post has given you a basic overview of writing good content for your pages. Stay tuned for:

• SEO Marketing Part 2: Titles n’ Tags
• SEO Marketing Part 3: Navigation, Categorization, Linking

Thanks for Reading!