Your search engine ranking, or search engine position, is determined by the relevance of your web page to the search term, or keyword, used by a search engine user looking for information – or so most SEO experts will tell you. You are wrong!
Sometimes I wonder who I am to say that the experts are wrong, because they should know more than I do, but do they really? Why should I be wrong and they are right just because they call themselves SEO “experts” or SEO “professionals”? I used to think that when I was younger, but now that I’ve grown up I realize that not all self-proclaimed “experts” actually know more than I do, and most “pros” are only because they make money from what they do. They are not right!
So I would repeat my first paragraph, but it would take up space unnecessarily. The reason they are wrong is that your position in search engine results, or your search engine ranking as many call it, is determined by how Google, or other search engines, calculate your relevance from mathematical formulas known as ‘algorithms’. From now on I will use ‘Google’ for all search engines, instead of just writing ‘and other search engines’. OK?
In other words, my point is that it’s Google’s calculation that matters, not the relevance of your web page to the keyword. Let us accept it without discussion, because it is a fact. The relevant point is that if we meet the needs of that algorithm, we will have satisfied Google’s needs for a high listing, regardless of the needs of the search engine user. Then let’s get started.
Your search engine ranking is the result of a combination of factors. The three main common factors regarding the content of your web page are:
1. The title tag
Your html must include a title tag between the two HEAD tags. That can include your business name to promote your brand, but it must include your keyword for the page. Google results pages, not domains, so each page should be optimized for a different keyword. Your title should include your keyword.
2. The header tags.
Your page content should be headed with a content title. That should include your page’s keyword (a keyword can be a single word or a long phrase) and be contained within the H1 tags. Paragraphs can have their own headings, where you use H2 tags and secondary keywords that are used in each paragraph.
3. Keyword density. Do not believe those who say that you should have a keyword density (KD) of 3%. That means 12 times in a 400 word passage, and if your keyword is, say, ‘How to improve your search engine ranking’, a KD of 3% would mean that 84 of your 400 words would be keywords (3 x 7 x 400/100). That is total nonsense, and your text would be in danger of being considered keyword spam.
In fact, you only need to include your keyword 3 times in a 400 word article, not 3%. The rest of your relevance would come from the rest of the text on your page. That is the purpose of Google’s LSI algorithm, or Latent Semantic Indexing. You don’t actually need any keywords on your web page, because Google will calculate what your page is about from the strings in your text.
However, you shouldn’t lose, and it might help, if you use a maximum of 1% keyword density, or 4 instances (excluding title and header) on a 400 word page. But surely not anymore
The biggest influence of these three will be the title and header tags. After that, we can see your internal link structure and also the external links to and from your website. However, these are the basic methods of improving your search engine ranking, and there are even better ways to achieve it. Your search engine position can be greatly influenced by your internal link structure, and that can have a significant influence on your search engine listing position.
Other than that, there are many specialized techniques, such as how to structure your website and how you direct search engine spiders around your site. That can be a major factor in your search engine ranking, and while many people have heard of the Title and Heading tags, and perhaps know how to use them correctly, few understand the negative meaning of allowing a search engine crawler to access a link to another page before it has a chance to view the content on your home page.
There’s a lot to learn about your search engine ranking, and these tips should help you rank higher in search engines and attract an increasing amount of free traffic from search engines like Google.