Possibly
the Biggest Misconception about Ranking Well In the
Search Engines...
By Brad Callen
Which
is more important? On page optimization or off page
optimization? If you are serious about getting your website to the top
of the
search engines, you MUST know the answer to this question...
Quick Review,
On page search engine optimization are things that you can
change ON your webpage.
Title tag
Header tags
Bolding, Italicizing, Underlining
Alt image tags
Meta Tags
Etc.
Off page search engine optimization comes down to basically
1 thing, which websites are linking to your website and how they're
doing it.
Anchor text uses in your link
The title of the page your link is on
The page rank of the page your link is on
The "theme" of the website your link is on
Etc.
By now, I'm hoping you see that it's the off page search
engine optimization factors that will get your website to the top of
the search
engines. Again, the on page factors are things you SHOULD do, but are
not
nearly as important as the off page factors.
Ok... Let me show you why. Let's analyze a website! In this
example I'm going to analyze the #1 ranked website on Google for the
search
term "click here". First, let's go to Google and enter "click
here". You'll notice that the #1 ranked website is www.adobe.com.
That's
interesting...
Now, why would adobe.com rank #1 for that search term? I
would think adobe.com would rank well for terms like:
graphic design programs
create printable documents
web design programs
and other keywords related to what they sell...
The word "click here" isn't in the page title
The word "click here" isn't in the URL of the website.
The word "click here" isn't even in the
description listed by Google!
Now, let's click on the listing in Google and check out the
actual webpage. Now, get this... The words "click here" aren't even
on the webpage, anywhere!If all of those on page optimization
techniques that
many SEO companies talk about were true, then don't you think a
different
website would rank #1 for this term?
On page optimization factors like:
keyword density
keyword prominence
keyword proximity
bolding, italicizing, underlining
etc.
Are NOT critical to worry about when trying to rank well for
a search term. Yes, you should sprinkle your keyword throughout the
webpage and
do the other on page optimization techniques I've taught you in
previous
lessons, but again, I really want to drill this into your head. It is
the off
page optimization that will increase your rankings in the search
engines;
specifically Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Then why exactly does adobe.com rank #1 on Google
For the term "click here"?
Let's do some website analysis on this adobe.com. I'm going
to use a software product called SEO Elite to do this, but you can
analyze the
website manually if you choose to do so. I prefer SEO Elite because it
only
takes a few minutes, as opposed to several hours.
First, we'll select radio button 1.
Next, we'll enter the URL from Google into step 2.
(http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)
Next, we'll select Google from the list of search engines.
Finally, click "ok" to run SEO Elite. When it's
finished running, let's click on the "report view" tab to view some
of the results.
The first thing you should notice is the Google Page Rank of
all of the pages linking to adobe.com. If you click the column heading
within
SEO Elite labeled "Google PR", it will sort the column in descending
order.
You can see that the pages linking to adobe.com have an
extremely high Page Rank. Any website with a Page Rank of 6 or higher
are VERY
high page ranks. There are only a handful of PR9 websites on the entire
internet and a few are actually linking to adobe.com!
Next, let's click the "analysis view" tab.
If we click the column heading titled "anchor
text", it will sort this column in descending order. We can quickly see
that the words "click" and "here" are within the top 10
words listed in the left hand column.
Remember, the anchor text column will show you the number of
times the word in the "Word" column appears in the actual anchor text
of the link pointing to adobe.com
Anchor Text:
Example) Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader...
"Click here" is the anchor text in the example
above.
So, by looking at the analysis above, we can see that the
word "click" appeared in 16 of the links pointing to adobe.com and
6.8% of the total links pointing to adobe.com contained the keyword
"click".
The keyword "here" was found in 34 links pointing to adobe.com and
appeared 14.5% of the time.
Reason adobe.com is ranked #1
The main two reasons that adobe.com is ranked #1 for the
keyword "click here" is because:
The websites linking to adobe.com are very quality (have a
high Page Rank)
The websites linking to adobe.com used the keywords
"click" and "here" many times in the anchor text of the
links linking to adobe.com
Until next time, happy optimizing!
About The Author
Brad Callen
Professional SEO and creator of the powerful Web Promotion
Software, SEO Elite