Do key words have any effect?

key words, search engines, importance

[ballada]

I would just like to know if key words really matter to search engines.

I have a beauty site, ok its a girly thing, that is rated 3/10 but does not appear in the top 20 pages of Google yet on the 4th page is an article which when you view the page source has Nigeria,Africa,oil,politics, Niger Delta and so on with beauty and health being the last one.

How does that get to have a greater relevance than mine which has the right words in the title, key words, first paragraph etc. and what am I doing wrong?

Puzzled.

Dominique

[mack]

Is your site quite new. It can take time for search engines to acuratly rank your content.

Also a very importaint factor is getting links from other sites to your pages. A lot of getting your pages to rank is based on off-site aspects such as links pointing to you. A link from a site to you is almost like a vote of quality from that site to your site. Anchor text is also importaint. The anchor text is the actual text the site that links to you uses for the link.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

Mack.

[ballada]

Hi Mack. Thanks for the reply, my site is rated 3/10 I have a few links but have not gone out of my way to add them since my site got hacked and I lost a load of pages with the links on them.

I guess I will have to go and get them all again. It does cheese me off when so many sites either with no relevance or are just landing pages get ranked ahead of mine. Not that mine is the greatest but I have worked darned hard at it.

Regards Dominique