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Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings

January 27, 2006 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

Are you building a new web site or will you soon be re-organizing your current site? If so, this article is for you as it focuses on a few of the fundamental building blocks that many sites often miss when being launched or updated. We want you to start thinking about how search engines navigate through the pages on your site, the depth or extent of content that your pages provide around a given subject, and the manner in which you optimize your pages. By making these considerations and taking action, you can help to reinforce the ideas that your site is attempting to convey, improve relevance among the engines, and in turn gain better rankings.

Consider how search engines navigate through your site.

Search engines learn about your site/pages from your site when you submit to the engines and from other web pages that link to you. Because other sites can link to any given page on your site, the engines do not have to start indexing your site from your base URL; for example “http://www.site.com”. In their scan of a page, they normally find text based links and links embedded in simple graphics. For example if a page was centered on the term “Adwords”:

- They can note any keywords that were used in the URL of the link:
<a href=”http://adwords.blogspot.com/”>Click here</a> to learn more.
as in: Click here to learn more.

- They can look at keywords used in the text of the link text itself:
The <ahref=”http://adwords.blogspot.com/”>Google Adwords</a> team has announced that they are…
as in: The Google AdWords team has announced that they are…

Search engine robots do not completely understand human language in the way that we do, but do attempt to emulate the way that we learn about language and explore written language. In some ways you might think of them as archeologists with a rosetta stone, attempting to decipher the HTML and words used on your site in order to discover the overall theme(s) in a given page, section of your site, or site overall. Thus, using a keyword in the URL and/or in the link text could certainly help an engine to better understand the focused term/concept/idea. If you instead used more general link text, like the following, an engine may not find as much relevance:

“…Click here to learn more about this announcement…”

Engines normally do not ’see’ the words in graphics, nor do they fill out web based forms, and they can have a difficult time following links embedded in technologies like flash, DHTML, javascript, and other interesting/interactive technologies. So while you could have a normal graphic with words telling a customer that your product information can be found by clicking the graphic… Why not put that information in text link? You could do this either near the graphic, create a text based link to the product on a side bar somewhere or even create a site map with text based links to your most important pages… like this:

http://www.webposition.com/sitemap.asp

Consider the ‘depth’ that you go into on a particular topic.

The phrase ‘content is king’ is very, very true in SEO. Those sites that provide a depth of knowledge on a given topic across many pages are often viewed as more relevant than a site or a section of pages with only a limited number of pages on a subject.

Remember that anyone who uses the same keyword(s) as you, for a given topic, can become a competitor. Consider the keyword “iPod”. You could be a site that reviews tech products, a vendor that may sell Apple MP3 players, or a person simply talking about your iPod nano, and search engines may find pages that focus on the term “iPod” and view them all as potentially relevant matches.

In the graphic below, Site A could have a very, very in depth page that is optimized on the work “iPod MP3 Player” and a check out page where as Site B has a similarly in depth product page that they want to rank as well as several sub pages on the topic that provide iPod reviews, explain the technical site of the product, give you the opportunity to buy or learn about 2 iPod car chargers that they sell, as well as various other pages that go into a bit more depth off of these pages. Each of these pages could use text based links, graphic links, link to a sectional or site wide site map, etc. and thus provide both relevant, optimized content on the term iPod, sub terms like iPod car chargers, and more. The idea is to cluster your like pages and reinforce a central theme, keyword, or keyword phrase.

How do you optimize for more than one engine?

It is indeed, a good idea to optimize for more than one engine. Each search engine has it’s own scale or weighting system when reviewing the same, exact set of pages. When you optimize for multiple engines, this is a fairly straight forward process; you will have some pages that are optimized for one engine, and some pages that are optimized for other engines. Continuing from the last example, you may have a sub section of iPod accessory pages that include main pages for each of two different brands of iPod car chargers and sub pages that further describe some aspect/feature/benefit of each car charger. You can mix optimized pages with one another. When engine A scans all of the pages below in red/yellow, it will gravitate more toward the ‘engine A’ optimized pages in red. When it reads the ‘engine B’/yellow pages, this adds relevance to the section as a whole and the engine A based pages although they are a bit less likey to be ranked as well in engine A.

As a best practice we -do not- recommend that you duplicate the same page over and over with only slight tweaks for one engine or another. Some companies take this to an extreme and create many, many duplicated pages that differ only slightly from one another, then attempt to employ techniques to keep each engine from reading content designed for the other. While this technique may have been useful in the far past, the engines are more savvy today and can often catch this type of action, failing that, competitors may catch and report this behavior as well. So your best bet is to create lots of good, content rich, unique pages that work well for site visitors who visit them, as well as search engines.

By implementing text based links that contain your keyword or phrase in the link text or the URL, adding more depth to your site’s content, and optimization you can help improve your rankings and become more friendly to your site’s visitors. We encourage you to learn more about optimizing your site using the Page Critic feature found in the WebPosition trial software.

Google ‘Big Daddy’ Search Test

By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

Periodically Google tests new incarnations of their search algorithm. Googler Matt Cutts has encouraged conversation/review of a possible Google update called ‘Big Daddy‘ at: “http://66.249.93.104“.