Here, we’ll look at how search engines work and reckon. This is vital as all excellent SEO experts have a solid understanding of how the major engines like Google reckon and act. If you’re to maximise your free search engine traffic, you need to do the same.

Take a look at our video on how search engines work here:

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Next, we’ll look at some more rules of thumb for getting high search engine rankings:

Crawler/Spider Considerations

Also, consider technical factors. If a site has a slow connection, it might time-out for the crawler. Very complex pages, too, may time out before the crawler can harvest the text.

If you have a hierarchy of directories at your site, place the most vital information high, not deep. Some search engines will presume that the higher you placed the information, the more vital it is. And crawlers may not venture deeper than three or four or five directory levels.

Higher than all remember the obvious – full-text search engines such index text. You may well be tempted to use fancy and expensive design techniques that either block search engine crawlers or leave your pages with very small plain text that can be indexed. Don’t fall prey to that temptation.

Ranking Rules Of Thumb

The simple rule of thumb is that make pleased counts, and that make pleased near the top of a page counts for more than make pleased at the end. In particular, the HTML title and the first couple lines of text are the most vital part of your pages. If the words and phrases that match a query happen to grow in the HTML title or first couple lines of text of one of your pages, chances are very excellent that that page will grow high in the list of search results.

A crawler/spider search engine can base its ranking on both static factors (a computation of the value of page independent of any particular query) and query-dependent factors.

Values

- Long pages, which are rich in meaningful text (not randomly generated letters and words).

- Pages that supply as excellent hubs, with lots of links to pages that that have related make pleased (theme similarity, rather than random meaningless links, such as those generated by link exchange programs or intended to generate a fake impression of “popularity”).

- The connectivity of pages, including not just how many links there are to a page but where the links come from: the number of distinct domains and the “quality” ranking of those particular sites. This is calculated for the site and also for individual pages. A site or a page is “excellent” if many pages at many different sites top to it, and especially if many “excellent” sites top to it.

- The level of the directory in which the page is found. Higher is considered more vital. If a page is buried too deep, the crawler simply won’t go that far and will never find it.

These static factors are recomputed about once a week, and new excellent pages slowly percolate upward in the rankings. Note that there are advantages to having a simple address and sticking to it, so others can erect links to it, and so you know that it’s in the index

Query-Dependent Factors

- The HTML title.

- The first lines of text.

- Query words and phrases appearing early in a page rather than late.

- Meta tags, which are treated as run of the mill words in the text, but like words that grow early in the text (unless the meta tags are patently unrelated to the make pleased on the page itself, in which case the page will be penalized)

- Words mentioned in the “anchor” text associated with hyperlinks to your pages. (E.g., if lots of excellent sites link to your site with anchor text “breast cancer” and the query is “breast cancer,” chances are excellent that you will grow high in the list of matches.)

Blanket Policy On Doorway Pages And Cloaking

Many search engines are opposed to doorway pages and cloaking. They consider doorway and masked pages to be spam and encourage people to use other avenues to increase the relevancy of their pages. We’ll talk about doorway pages and cloaking a bit later.

Meta Tags (Question.Com As An Example)

Though Meta tags are indexed and considered to be regular text, Question.com claims it doesn’t give them priority over HTML titles and other text. Though you should use meta tags in all your pages, some webmasters claim their doorway pages for Question.com rank better when they don’t use them. If you do use Meta tags, make your description tag no more than 150 font and your keywords tag no more than 1,024 font long.

Keywords In The URL And File Names

It’s generally said that Question.com gives some weight to keywords in filenames and URL names. If you’re making a file, try to name it with keywords.

Keywords In The ALT Tags

Question.com indexes ALT tags, so if you use images on your site, make sure to add them. ALT tags should contain more than the image’s description. They should include keywords, especially if the image is at the top of the page. ALT tags are clarified later.

Page Length

There’s been some debate about how long doorway pages for AltaVista should be. Some webmasters say small pages rank higher, while others argue that long pages are the way to go. According to AltaVista’s help section, it prefers long and informative pages. We’ve found that pages with 600-900 words are most likely to rank well.

Form Support

AltaVista has the skill to index frames, but it sometimes indexes and links to pages intended only as navigation. To keep this from experience to you, submit a form-free site map containing the pages that you want indexed. You may also want to include a “robots.txt” file to prohibit AltaVista from indexing certain pages.