Kendal

Relevancy

There are a number of ways to establish a page’s relevancy in the eyes of search engines. One of these methods is called the “on-page factor”. On-page factors involve placing your keywords in strategic locations throughout the pages on your site, so that search engines know to associate those keywords with a specific web page.

Important on-page locations include

• Header Tags,
• Internal Links,
• External Links,
• Anchor Text,
• Bold and Italicized Text,
• HTML Lists,
• ALT Tags,
• Image Names,
• Dynamic Bread Crumb,
• Title,
• Description,
• Keywords,
• Headline,
• Deck,
• Page Body,
• and Page Name.

Another method to establish relevancy are “off-page factors”. These are the factors related to the pages that link to the site from other sites. Off-page factors include the inbound link anchor text, the text in the paragraphs surrounding that anchor text, the titles of the pages linking to the page, the other on page factors of the pages that link to the page, the directory categories the site is found in, the directory categories of the sites linking to the page, and many other factors.

Of the off-page factors, the inbound link anchor text is the most important, but they all play a role. Some search engines are more advanced than others, and make more complete use of this data; however, all of the major search engines are moving towards applying this data in order to increase the quality and relevancy of their search results.

Simply put; the topic of and theme of the page MUST be built around the keywords and key phrases you are targeting. If you are writing long sales copy, this is very difficult task to perform with without making the content read funny. In this case you would only focus on the first 5-10 paragraphs or the eye catcher.

A webmaster should always follow acceptability guidelines for each search engine. Review these guidelines and become familiar with them.

Google Guidelines: www.google.com/Webmasters/guidelines.html
Yahoo Guidelines: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
Ask Guidelines: http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/editorial_guidelines.shtml
DMOZ Guidelines: http://www.dmoz.org/help/submit.html

Their advice is to generally create content for the user; not the search engines – to make content easily accessible to their spiders and to not try to trick their system. Webmasters often make critical mistakes when designing or setting up their web sites, inadvertently “poisoning” them so that they will not rank well.

Coding guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/ should be followed as well as tested using their free valuator which checks the markup validity of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc.

http://validator.w3.org/

If the acceptability and coding guidelines are followed, and the site presents frequently updated, useful, original content, and a few meaningful, useful inbound links are established. It is very possible to obtain a significant amount of organic search traffic.

When a site has useful content, other Webmasters will naturally place links to the site, increasing its Page Rank and flow of visitors. When visitors discover a useful web site, they tend to refer other visitors by emailing or instant messaging links.

As a result, practices that improve web site quality are likely to outlive short term practices that simply seek to manipulate search rankings. Relevant, useful content will ensure you will always come out on top!