How Search Engines Rank Pages

Every smart search engine optimizer starts his or her career by looking at web pages with the eye of a search engine spider. Once the optimizer is able to do that, he or she is halfway to mastering the task.

The first thing to remember is that the search engines rank "pages", not "sites". What this means is that you will not achieve a high ranking for your site by attempting to optimize your main page for ten different keyword phrases. However, different pages of your site WILL appear up the list for different key phrases if you optimize each page for just one of them. If you can't use your keyword in the domain name, no problem – use it in the URL of some page within your site, e.g., in the file name of the page. This page will rise in relevance for the given keyword.

Second, understand that the search engines do not see the graphics and JavaScript dynamics your page uses to captivate visitors. You can use a graphic image of written text that says you sell beautiful Christmas gifts. But it does not tell the search engine that your Web site is related to Christmas gifts – unless you use an ALT attribute where you write about it.

The same concerns the usage of JavaScript. Look at the two examples:

1. Visit our page about discounted Samsung Monitors!
2. < script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> < /script>

The first is what visitors see, the second is the source code script that produces the output. Assume the search engine spider is intelligent enough to read the script (however, not all the spiders will, actually); is there anything in the code that can tell it about the Samsung monitor? Hardly!

As a rule, search engine spiders have a limit on loading page content. For instance, the Googlebot will not read more than 100 KB of your page, even though it is instructed to look to see whether there are keywords at the end of your page. So if you use keywords somewhere beyond this limit, this is invisible to spiders. Therefore, you may want to acquire the good habit of not overloading the HEAD section of your page with scripts and styles. Better link them from outside files, because otherwise they just push away your important textual content.

Article Author: Raul Vergara

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