What
Holds the Most Weight in Optimizing
Your Website for the Search Engines
There are
many factors that will determine where your website will rank on the major
search engines. Will your site be listed at the top? Or will it be lost
in the abyss like the majority of other websites out there today?
When optimizing
your website it is best to focus on the most important factors first.
One of those main factors is weight.
What do you
mean, weight?
I'm talking
about putting the most important things in the most important places.
Give
the greatest weight to your chosen keywords by focusing on them with diamond-point
accuracy.
Let's talk
about the title of a page. What are the most common two words at the beginning
of a site title? Any guesses? It's "Welcome to".
What a waste!
Google places
greater weight on words the closer to the beginning of the title you get.
So what should your page title start with?
Right!
Your most
important keywords for the page. And the next words in the title
should be your secondary keywords. I like to separate them with the vertical
bar or "pipe" symbol that's on the backslash key on your keyboard.
Now, I'm
not saying to go only for weight, and ignore the intelligibility of the
title - it should still make sense. But focus carefully on those words
and
consider carefully their positions.
That also
leads to another conclusion - the fewer the words, the more weight they
have. If you're optimizing a page for... "Cajun Cookbook" for
example, don't think up ways to include the words "Cajun" and
"cookbook" more times in your title. If you really are just
optimizing for these two words, that should be the only two words in your
title.
The title
of your page would then be just: Cajun Cookbook
NOT: Cajun
Cookbook | The cookbook for Cajun people and their cookbook loving Cajun
friends.
Simple. Consider
the weight.
The same
applies to anchor text. Anchor text is simply the typed in text that is
hyperlinked on a site. (i.e. anchor text)
If you try to stuff the anchor text of a link to that cookbook page with
as many instances of the keywords that you can think of, not only will
it look really stupid, but you will entirely dilute the weight of that
anchor text.
Because the
same principle applies to anchor text: it is weighted heavily
toward its beginning.
So when linking
to our cookbook page, the link should read: Cajun Cookbook
You
can put it in a sentence with other related words surrounding to make
it sound as good as you like, but only the words "Cajun Cookbook"
should be the link.
Weight.
A simple
concept that can make a real difference. And you know what? It will make
for a better visitor experience as well. Just about all good SEOs will
use this tactic. The visitor sees a simple, focused link to another page
- and when they click through to that page, the title is the same as the
link that brought them there.
The visitor most certainly knows EXACTLY what that page is about. (and
incidentally, so will Google!)
So consider
weight in the important places on your page.
And as always,
keep writing that valuable, keyword-rich content!
-Nathan Anderson
For more
information check out these Search Engine
Optimization Strategies
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