Basic SEO – Just Be Relevant!
Dec 6th, 2009 | By Dee | Category: Featured Articles, SEOby TDavid of http://www.scriptschool.com/
Lord knows I’m no search engine guy, so writing an article about search engines seems a little awkward to me. However, I can speak about the technical side of engines because in scripting I’ve written algorithms and I understand from a technical standpoint what these algorithms are created to do. So I offer this article to you not as a webmaster who has the inside track on the engines, but as a programmer who understands the technical side of what some search algorithms have been designed to look for.
Just be relevant.
It’s not original saying that, I realize, but IMHO it will be far more effective than “wanting to look relevant.”
It’s really pretty simple. You write a webpage and on that page it has articles, text, pi
ctures and content that match the niche of your site. You then can structure your meta tag description and meta keywords describing that niche – describing what your site provides to it’s visitors. Even better if you put text around any pictures describing what is in those pictures, or at least summarizing it like you might do in the image ALT tags.
I’ve seen people say use all the allowed words and keywords available to you. A programmer could write one line in as a “penalty clause” which would lower a site’s ranking for excessive verbiage or repeating of keywords or phrases. I’m not saying such clauses exist (sure they do), but if I wanted to cut down on spam in my perfect search engine (nothing’s perfect of course), I would do just that. It’s as easy as:
if($word_count > 3) { $penalize++; }
Now we rank according to the equation:
relevancy – penalty = overall score.
Therefore your page might be super relevant but because you overused words and/or phrases you find yourself penalized and thus LESS relevant. It’s one rather easy way to catch the relevant from the spam.
So is lesser better? Not necessarily. I would recommend creating the meta tags and descriptions to do exactly what they were designed to do: summarily describe the content of the page. No more, no less. I made a search engine for my site php-scripts.com that works entirely off the meta tags and does not consider the content of the page in determining the relevancy.
It was an important lesson for me to make relevant pages — not only because I wanted to attract major search engine spiders, but because I wanted my internal web to be able to allow useful relevant searches for people looking through my diary entries for scripting help. Spamming my own search engine would clearly have served no useful purpose for my site visitors. Sure, I could put “free scripts” on every page, but there aren’t free scripts on every page. There are example scripts on almost every page, and they are able to be freely used, but it’s not the same as someone looking for “free scripts”. Let’s look at one of my pages as an example:
http://www.php-sc...hp_diary/030301.php3
Essentially this page is diary-style answer to a question of how to install php scripts. There is no instructive code on this page, but there are references to useful resources. Now if I go to a search engine this page doesn’t rank very well (yet). But give it a few months and it might. The spiders will like this page because it is relevant and not intentionally so.
Interestingly (at the time this article was written) if you type “how to install php scripts” into the google search engine you’ll get the tdscripts main page as a top 10 listing out of 66,000 entries. The only thing we have on that page is that we install third party scripts, so it isn’t exactly matching the query — but it is matching the words “install php scripts”.
So the algorithms don’t always catch the intention of the page unless you help them. By “help”, I do not mean spam, I mean the best possible summary of the page using the meta tags and description and the text in your page to relate to the keywords. In google, you can click the “cache” and see what the search engine saw and how it ranked the page.
Before we go back to the example click on the “similar pages” link in the google engine next to the TD Scripts top listing. These are pages that the spider jumped from to find TD Scripts. If you find a good page that is relevant to a set of keywords, you want to trade traffic or at least put up a link to that page.
You may think, why should I give away traffic to this page? The answer is: you will increase your relevancy in some algorithms. For instance, I want to see how many pages are linking to the page above. If a lot of pages are, then it must match the search criteria better than others. I am going to coin this process as a reverse penalty:
if($related_url > = $x) { $penalty–; }
In the above, $x could equal a variable defined by the search engine programmers. Maybe it is 50 urls or 500, whatever the number is, if you have that many pages linking to it, the relevancy will increase. So by having a lot of sites link to a page it tells the engine that it must be more relevant. Therefore you should try to find links that you can offer that are relevant to your page and offer them to your surfers.
In some algorithms this can improve your position. From the webmaster side, I suppose this is like saying: “if my store doesn’t have the brand of cheese you are looking for, this store does … or might.” You are helping out the surfer and you are becoming more relevant in the engines, talk about a win-win situation.
Now, let’s look at this article I’ve just written above and try to make the meta tags for this article. I created a script to help us surf through the words and look for how many times words appear. This script is quite useful when it comes down to actually building your meta tags and descriptions. You can use the script any time you’d like at:
http://www.tdscri...ties/show_words.html
Now I’ll run this script and see what most the searchable words are and the number of times they appear in this article for 3 or more appearances in the document:
page/pages/page./page, – 14 /+6 /+4 /+3 = 27
search – 13
engine – 12
relevant – 8
algorithms – 5
meta – 5
article – 3
technical – 3
webmaster – 3
people – 3
SE – 3
relevant. – 3
keywords – 3
tags – 3
useful – 3
how – 3
install – 3
php – 3
link – 3
You may note if you run the script that there are a lot of words which could be parsed out like “and”, “the”, “to”, “and”, etc. — these words are ignored by search engines and thus we might want to ignore them in our meta-keywords, but they can be useful in creating a description.
I’ve demonstrated how you can use this tool to help you build more relevant meta description and keyword tags which actually relate to the content on the page. Over time this should help to improve the search engine rankings that you receive for your web pages.
We Recommend:
The Native Remedies Affiliate Program
The Native Remedies Affiliate Network is a Two-tier program with high conversion rates and top level commissions. You can Earn 25% commissions on each direct sale and 5% on second tier sales – so even affiliates that sign up via your site earn you commissions!
Commissions are lifetime! – so each time your customer buys again, you get commissions! Click now to learn more about the NativeRemedies/PetAlive Affiliate Program!
Become a Wholesale, Dropship or Distributor Customer!
As demand for NativeRemedies and Pet Alive natural health products & remedies have grown, so has the opportunity for distributors, wholesalers and drop shippers to partner with us. Whether you are a small or large retailer, alternative health provider, an individual with a broad network of associates or a large distributor, Native Remedies has a reseller program designed just for you!
Wholesale Purchase Program – For individual resellers, retail stores, health providers or others who purchase in bulk and who resell the products directly to consumers.
Drop Ship Purchase Program – For those who do not wish to order in bulk but who wish resell our products along with others and then have us drop ship the products for them. (No Dropship Fees!)
Distributor Purchase Program – For large distributors who typically wholesale our products to retail stores and health practitioners and who can meet the higher minimum order volumes.
MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate System
It’s no secret that 95% of all bloggers out there make pennies from affiliate marketing, while a select few who are privileged enough to be in the “inner circle” make thousands of dollars effortlessly. Ninja Affiliate is WordPress plugin developed to imbue lethal marketing powers into your WordPress blog and instantly double or triple your affiliate marketing commissions with almost no effort on your part.
Using Ninja Affiliate, you can automatically convert any keyword in your blog to an affiliate link instantly. You can also cloak your affiliate links, track them and manage them right from your WordPress text editor. AffiliateRugu uses and highly recommends Ninja Affiliate by MaxBlogPress!
