Forum Moderators: open
1. Keyword in Title Meta tag
2. Keyword in Description Meta tag
3. Keyword in Body text
4. Keyword density - 1-7%(?) - No more, no less. Results will vary. 5. Page Rank/Links - best if from related sites with higher PRs
6. Sufficient Content (Google seems to like bigger sites, more content)
7. Keyword in incoming links
8. Keyword in incoming link text
9. Keyword in text surrounding incoming link text
10. Keyword in <H1> tags
11. Keyword in outgoing links - best if to related sites with higher PRs
12. Keyword in outgoing link text
13. Keyword in text surrounding outgoing link text
14. Keyword in alt image tags
15. Keyword in bold
16. Keyword in italics
17. Keyword in domain or sub domain name
18. Keyword in keywords Meta tag
It sure works, but Google will have to normalise it soon. Build a links page and get to #1. It's silly. I think in the end we'll see the pendulum swing back towards Pagerank which is much harder to manipulate.
I can only guess Google put more weight on anchor text to buy themselves some time because they knew it would take a while for webmasters to catch up.
Thanks
Is there anyone could give an example for the best anchor text?
Anchor text just means that the word or words used to link from another site to your site contains your keyword.
If your keyword is widget, than the best anchor text would be linked text from another site that used the word widget to hyperlink to your site.
Also, the competition has to be considered. If nobody else has keywords, body text will do it, or even outbound anchor text - if others have the keywords you need title and <h> as well, and if others have (external) incoming as well you need incoming also.
As for keyword density, the analyzer on WebmasterWorld is still worth using: [searchengineworld.com...]
The calculation: Take all the words on your page, remove the fillerwords/stopwords, and then calculate the density. Calculate the same without removing the fillerwords and hold the two figures against each other - then you'll know how much keyword inventory you waste..hrm, put to good use of course.
I just analyzed one top-ranker for a very competitive two-worder (3.9M results). It had a total of 18 (!) different words on the page. They were used 119 times due to combinations - and impressive 50% were not stopwords. Very nice page, totally readable, and not looking spammy at all. That's art - sadly it wasn't my page, but boy did i learn something.
/claus
(not necessarily in this order)
[edited by: Net_Wizard at 10:46 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2003]
You think that too many stop-words hurt rankings? I suppose this makes sense if you think about it. And you're right, it takes a very good "artist" to not use many stop words AND make the content good as well as being a nice read. That's something to strive for. I agree with the incoming anchor text argument in that it is VERY important to ranking. As well, put your keyphrase 1st in your title tag, 1st in your description tag, in an <h1> and <h2> tag and at the beginning of your main page content. That's what I do and it seems to be working.
Dave.
Would that be fresh content anywhere on your site, or just the page you want ranked well? (Or both) :) I mean, obviously you want all of your pages to rank well, but let's just say you have a page called "furry and rusty widgets". Now, let's say you add a new page of content called, "Rubbery widgets". By adding the "rubbery widgets" content, would that help your "furry and rusty widgets" page?
Dave.
Seriously, there are various ways to add fresh content to 'all' of your pages without diluting the target keyword/s of each page.
Cheers
I used to use:
<H1><font face="verdana" color="teal" size="+1">Acme Widgets</font></H1>
to get the <H1> but not the huge type size. But I figured that was trickery, and rather than risk getting penalized, I now just use <H2> which is a more reasonable size for a heading.
>> too many stop-words hurt rankings?
It hurts keyword density, but you can just include more keywords if you want to increase it. I'm speculating in a combination of KW-density and not too many words, ie. extreme focus. I have no proof yet, and i'm not sure it is valid in all areas. I think there might be something here for very competitive searches, but it's hard to prove.
>> it takes a very good "artist"
Post #98 has 107 words in it. Most frequent ones are: and (5), your (4), to (4), that (4), it (4), in (4), you (3), the (3), tag (3). That's nine. Now, pick two keywords and seven more words to compose a non-spammy looking web page 12 words longer than that post and 50 words shorter than this one. Artwork.
/claus
Only way I've managed it is to optimise a page for 15-20 keywords(hard for some ery specific sites) or to add more than 300 words of text on the page.
Free hint: try writing 20 pages, each optimized for a specific keyword. This should be more effective than what you are trying to do.
Widget in title, keyword,descscription, text,alt tgs,iamge name links text,links in text, etc etc
I'm going to get more than 20% keyword density for widgets for sure. Aren't I?
At some point, it is NOT spamming it is accurate description of what the page is about, and useful for search engines.
You can stuff your page with keywords, and bring keyword density down by putting heaps of words on the page, but then you get hit for having too many words on the page, and thus no relevancy to anything in particular.
I believe keword density plays a role, but is mostly misunderstood. You can have two pages with the exact same keyword density, PR and incoming links, but they will rank much differently depending on where the keywords appear and the amount of "diluting'text on the page.
Your ranking. It will never beat on-topic incoming anchor text, and it's less relevant than title-headline. However, if you are unable to control the incoming anchor text (as most are, given it's not on their sites) it will help. There are even sites where changing titles and headlines is not an option, believe it or not. Sometimes it just must be "BigCo ZapWidUltra" in stead of "Fast durable widgets".
In these cases you can only work with the copy. So many big corporates get beat in the serps these days due to their design manuals and corporate politics (not to mention "marketing"), but their sites still look just wonderful to management.
/claus
I agree totally to that, it's just not always an option.
but then you get hit for having too many words on the page
No you don't. I have never seen any proof of this.
Yeah, go ahead and make 7K pages or less, that is the advice.
(disclaimer, I am not involved in any of the following fields but this is a case that calls for real examples)
Well, lets just try some common real words:
website - First page is 17k-63k
car - 3k and 5 k are th small ones, the rest are 35k-89k averaging above 50k
airlines - one listing no size, 5k redirect page and the rest are 18k-78k
Oh but those are non competitive single words you say. Well, I've heard that travel affiliates are big time on optimizing their sites, so lets look at a couple of those.
San Francisco Hotels - #1 is 54k. the rest are 16k-50k
Las Vegas casino - 6k to 40k
Orlando vacations - 6k to 59k
Hey let's even go to spam central and try
viagra - 5k to 35k. This is the closest to showing that it makes any difference, with several 5k. but they are trying every trick in the book proven or not.
But if we change that to
discount viagra - we get 6k-38k with only one under 10k.
I listed every example that I tried, I didn't have to go searching for examples that proved my case.
File size might have meant something at some point, but it doesn't mean anything now. And even the "research" that I saw before on how it affected search results was fatally flawed. It did not take into account that the results being returned closely matched the size distribution of pages on the web.
I did try to emphasize that it was my personal speculations. I'll repeat that. Personal speculations, nothing more. No evidence, nada. It's not one, but two things combined - page size and keyword density, and i find it very hard to prove anything. I did write that. As to the research you mention, i'd be glad to get a pointer.
>> get hit for having too many words
Literally, i suppose yes. The more different words you have the more odd searches will feature your page. This is not necessarily bad.
/claus
The top site is flash based and 2k one of teh top ranked sites appears to be nothing but clickable adverts.
Some one take a look!
And they DON"T have a huge home page.
Yes, have a ape bigger than 6k, but my point was if yout stack every image,title,<h1> wiht the same yewords, you are going to ahve to go over 100K to bring the keyword density below spam levels.
Yes, its only an opinion.
It works a treat on Inkotomi (Mis spelt I know) I cant wait to see Google list it.
One other thing I find Google works on a 3 monthly update,list one being around 15th August. Anyone else noticed this?
Does anyone disagree that this should not be a problem for Google. I know they say they don't index PHP pages, but I cannot see how they could recognise these pages as php-generated since the PHP generates the HTML on the server, and you can't see they're PHP from the URL.
I understood them to mean the spiders won't index files with a .php extension (or perhaps "? variables") BUT over the past 24 hours googlebot crawlers have requested 429 (mostly unique) html pages from my site. I was very surprised to see they also requested one of the very few pages that is explicitly PHP: I have a link on every page of my site to a ./tell-a-friend.php?page=filename.html to allow visitors to e-mail the page to a friend. GOOGLEBOTS HAVE REQUESTED THIS PAGE 47 TIMES :o The requests have come at spaced intervals over the past 24 hours.
Does anyone have any idea why the crawlers are doing this? One of the reasons I named the page .php not .html was so Google wouldn't index it.
Where did you get the idea that google does not index php?
As he stated, your keyword doesn't even need to appear on the page to rank number one.
If I'm searching for widgets and JuniorOptimizer's site is coming on top, without the word 'widget' appearing on the page, I will be leaving as fast as I can.
Where did you get the idea that google does not index php?
[google.com...]
Don't mind the #1 result, it's rather odd.
>> one of teh top ranked sites appears to be nothing but
...very few words of which around 14 are the keyword, placing the page high above recommended KW-density levels. And only 10 G-backlinks beating 500. Still, it's not proof, it's only an oddity that might indicate something - there may be other explaining factors.
Edit: added some
[edited by: claus at 1:22 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2003]
