Each search engine has developed a formula for ranking web sites. Every search engine uses a different formula, which is why the results will be different between Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com and other search engines. These formulas known as algorithms are constantly changing as the search engines strive to achieve improved results.
Our company provides a service that is known in the industry as search engine optimization, search marketing or SEO for short. Because search engines are constantly evolving, it is important to stay informed of these changes in order to modify your on site optimization and SEO strategy. Sourceline Media has 10 years of experience analyzing search engines and applying successful strategies to achieve high rankings. One of our core websites, Resume-Resource.com gets over 10 million visitors a year which is 100% organic. This means that our traffic comes only from natural links, online directories and search engines. None of the traffic comes from paid advertising.
So How do Search Engines Rank Websites?
There are certain basic factors that all the search engines use to help value a site and propel that site to the top of the rankings. The major areas of search engine optimization are show in the image below.
The perfectly optimized website will have the right blend of keyword usage with content that flows naturally. The site will also have a lot of back links from other web sites. The search engine uses this information to determine which sites get ranked the highest. The key components to SEO are:
1. Building Quality Back Links to Your Website – The most imporant aspect of search engine rankings is to get quality web sites to link to you. This is also the most difficult and time consuming task. Search engines believe that when good sites link to you, your site must provide valuable content, therefore it’s trustworthy and deserves a higher ranking . Links from quality directories, web sites in your niche and social media sites are ideal.
2. Anchor Text in Back Links – It’s not only the link that is important, but also the text inside of the link. If you have a link like this: www.sourcelinemedia.com – then the search engine only sees the site domain as part of its rankings. If you use anchor text such as Website Marketing and Design then search engines will rank you higher for anyone that searches for “website marketing” or “website design.”
3. On Page Optimization – The keywords that you have on your pages play a big role in search. This includes keywords in titles, paragraphs and headings on a page. There are keywords that are listed in HTML tags such as “alt” tags for images. It’s important to optimize keywords in meta data such titles, descriptions and keywords that are part of the page code and are not seen by the visitor. It is critical to analyze the targeted keywords and optimize keyword usage on each page. A high keyword density and your site gets penalized for spam. Too few keywords and your site won’t rank high for those searches.
Of course, this is just the basics of SEO. A detailed analysis of each site is needed to ensure you are doing everything possible to rank higher. After a decade of successfully building high traffic websites, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. We still manage our high traffic sites, so we must stay informed of changes and upgrade our strategies to remain at the top. If you need help ranking higher in search, then contact us today.