Web Centre

Improving your search engine ranking

For many people search engines like Google, Yahoo, Altavista, All the Web and MSN are primary routes via which visitors find their web sites.

When your site is competing for visitors with other related sites it's important to know how you can go about ensuring that your site appears high up in the search listings. The nearer the top of the listings your site is the more likely it is to be visited by someone interested in that area.

Each Search Engine has it's differences in terms of the calculations and methods it uses to rank sites - and most of them are very secretive about exactly what methods they use to stop them being exploited. Using Google as the main example here are some snippets of information that might help your site feature higher up in the listings:

Google's PageRank™ system

Google uses a complex system, invented by its founders, called PageRank™ to rank sites. There are two elements to this ranking procedure:

• Firstly, Google's PageRank™ works like a big voting system. Every web site is assigned a value/importance based on the number/quality of votes it receives. When another site links to your site it is effectively casting a vote for your site. Volume of votes is useful but so is the relative worth of the site casting them. Votes from sites that are already important count for more than ones from unknown sites. So for example if you could get an important established web site like the BBC or another University to link to your site then that would go a long way to helping your page ranking improve and making your site more important.
• Secondly, Google uses a sophisticated text matching process to find sites that match your query. When it does find sites that match your query it looks at their relative value and ranks them accordingly. When Google is matching the text it isn't just looking at the frequency with which a word appears on the page - it looks for at all aspects of the page's content including things like headings, page title, link wording (anchor text) and beyond that the relevance of content on pages that link into your site.

This system makes it extremely difficult to cheat your ranking. You can't directly buy a higher page ranking, but there are companies that offer to get web sites to the top of the rankings for a fee - however what these companies do is work on preparing a site to get the most from the PageRank™ system i.e. improve linking and sharpen up page content so that the site's get higher importance and greater definition.

Getting your page content right

Keyword Phrases - One of the ways search engines work is by matching users search text to keywords that appear on web sites. This means that the keywords that a person chooses are absolutely crucial. They must be representative of both the site content and of what phrases an individual might use to search for your site. The only way you can know this is by doing decent research or by using research tools such as KeywordDiscovery, Google AdWords, and Yahoo Search Marketing data. You need to make lists of relevant keywords/phrases for each of your main pages.

Navigation and site architecture based on keywords - If you know what your keywords/phrases are then you can use that to help with the layout of your site. If your navigation and site structure is based round your keywords then it will make your site stand out as more relevant when search engines look at it to decide whether it matches a particular set of search parameters.

Search engine friendly - Search engines scan and probe round your pages but can't dig down into your forms, search facilities, JavaScript links and menus and areas of your site done in Flash. So if you are using these types of things on your site then make sure that there are also well labelled html alternatives. You don't want a search engine to ignore your site just because it can't 'see' your relevant content.

Internal text links (anchor text) and image alt tags - Part of the text searching process that these engines do includes looking at the text you use on the clickable parts of your links. If a link is descriptive of what you will be getting when you click i.e. 'Download the new student podcast' then that will improve the page's rating in terms of relevance to the search being conducted. Use your keywords in your links if you can. If you just put 'click here' then you're not being helpful or relevant to your potential visitor which will reflect in the search engine listing position you achieve. The same rule applies to the alt text you put on images - make it descriptive and relevant, search engines do look at it.

Highly visible copy based around your keywords - One major thing you can do to improve your ranking is have good relevant copy on your pages. If your pages use your keywords phrases in a relevant and meaningful way then the search engines are now sophisticated enough to recognise that as being better than a person that fills a page with keywords. It's also important, as mentioned earlier, that your main copy is not hidden within something that the search engines can't scan, like for example a flash video.

Use your keywords in your page Title - It's important that you utilise your page's <title> html tags and give the page a proper title. Search engines put a lot of weight on the title of a page when checking for relevance so use your keywords if you can. E.g. The University of Leicester's main pages carry the title "University of Leicester".

Make your site worth linking to - As touched on previously, if you get other sites to link to your site then it's rank in search engine listings will get better - and if those sites are prestigious sites it will be even better still. Collecting these reciprocal links from other sites can be hard but you can make it a lot easier by making your site worth linking to. You'll get a poor response if you have a poor site - but if your site is fantastic people will want to link to it and some sites may actually approach you to trade links. Whilst it's almost impossible to keep track of all the sites that might have links to your site you can control the quality of the sites you link to - don't link to a lot of poor quality sites because this will damage the integrity of your own site be association. Always go for quality of reciprocal linking over quantity.