Search engines are a lot like humans. When somebody searches for something, a search engine reads the text on a page and decides how relevant the content is to what that person is searching for. It then decides how important that page is in relation to all the other pages that may also contain relevant content.
Old tricks
In the early days of the web, it was more about what you couldn”t see on a page. Hidden code called meta tags contained keywords and descriptions, which meant you could put just about anything in there to trick a search engine into thinking your site was the most relevant, even if the actual content wasn”t really up to much. Another way of hiding multiple instances of keywords and phrases was to place text on your page that was the same colour as the background. It didn”t matter if it didn”t make sense, because nobody could see it.But the search engines got wise and started to penalise people for using hidden text tricks, and stopped looking at meta tags years ago. Despite this, you”d be amazed at how many people still spend hours working out what they want me to make their meta keywords tags say, before I break the bad news to them.These days, as a general rule, tricks don”t work. You can”t fool them. Even if you choose your key phrases and endlessly repeat them in the body text of your page, if you make it really obvious that this is what you”re doing, you may get penalised.
Content is king
Spend your time making your content genuinely the best and most relevant out there, rather than looking for ways to subvert. Throw some key phrases in by all means, but the most successful pages use informative content in plain English rather than extraneous text that is obviously only there as an excuse to repeat keywords.
Page Rank
In order to decide how important your page is, a search engine will look at how many inbound links there are, in other words how many sites have a link to yours. Years ago someone came up with the bright idea of making lots of little sites with not much in the way of content other than links to their main site, in order to make the latter seem more important. But search engines got wise to this and learned how to recognise these ”link farms”. As a result, the quantity of inbound links became less important than the quality. In other words, search engines took into account how important the sites linking to you were.So the golden rule is don”t try to trick them, because it won”t work. You can”t fool them. Even if it works for a short while, you”ll lose out in the long run.
Don”t put all your eggs in one basket
Even if you do follow all the rules and find success in getting your page to the top of the search results, don”t count on staying there. Search engines can change their algorithms on a whim and you may suddenly find your ranking slips without warning, leaving you wondering where all your traffic went (answer: somebody elses site). So don”t build your entire business around your search engine performance. Look to additional sources to pomote your site such as social networking and more traditional methods. Be prepared to adapt to survive. If you would like to know more about promoting your web site, please feel free to contact me.
