Getting Strategic Placement in the Search Engines

Because of the competitive nature of the search engines the search engine companies keep much of how they return results proprietary. In addition, the search engines are constantly updating these rules on how their engines work. A given search engine may use anywhere from 20-200 different criteria for evaluating your site for positioning on a given keyword phrase. Almost all of the criteria are based on targeting the page to a specific keyword phrase. The more common factors involving the keyword phrase can be summarized as:

The number and quality of the links into your site.
How you use your keyword phrase on your page: the prominence (how close to the beginning of the title, description, headline, and body) and the density (frequency of the phrase as a percentage of the total number or words).
The use of keywords on the page that are often used with the keyword phrase. For example, for a web page optimized for "search engine optimization", words like "seo", "positioning", and "keyword phrase" can help the positioning in some search engines. Google is probably the only engine with technology in this area at the moment.

Other factors that control positioning include the accuracy of your HTML, whether you have bad links (dangling links or links to bad neighborhoods), and whether the page is clean of coding errors.

Google is the most popular of the search engines, drawing over 40% of all search engine traffic. Google maintains one of the largest databases of pages, and also bases a lot of ranking of a particular page on the number and quality of the links going into the page. The Yahoo engine is probably the second most popular. The ranking in this search engine is more dependent upon the page design; that is, how the keyword phrase is used on the page.

Your goal is to get in the first ten listings of the search engines when using your keyword phrase. You need to be on the first page returned. About 75% will go on to the second page if they haven't found what they are looking for. Less than 25% go on to the third page. Most people will try another search phrase if they haven't found it by then.

Note: You are in a VERY competitive environment in doing this. Often you will have hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages competing with you in the results. Do you know how to get to the top?