Web search engine optimization articles by UZilla.org

Search Engine Optimization factors – part one (20th July 2007)

This is a list of search engine optimization factors accompanied with real world website examples that illustrate a correlation between the presence of a given factor and the Google ranking for a search term.

This list is part one of a series of articles about search engine optimization factors. Broadly speaking the factors are presented in order of importance although the sum of the parts (i.e. bigger picture) is more important that than any single factor in overall page rank determination. Therefore a strategy should be employed that achieves a balance with regard to the presence of these factors within your webpages.

Keyword relevance

The content of your site in relation to the search term is one of, if not the most, important search engine ranking factors. In essence your webpage has to match the search term to even be considered in the query results.

If you make some obscure searches this concept will be illustrated. For example search on the term onions are dried up and you will see pages that have this expression or have these words close together in the content. It is important to write content around a theme but there is evidence that over doing the occurrences of keywords in your webPages can be harmful, as it is interrupted as using spam for the sake of ranking.

There are many discussions around keyword density, that is the optimal percentage of keywords to the complete webpage content, and some rules of thumb have been put forward with keyword density measurement tools. A popular tool is below (from keyworddensity.com)

A 3% to 7% keyword ratio is generally recommended, so in a webpage consisting of 500 words your key word should appear between 15 to 35 times. If you want a phrase then I suggest dividing this number by the words in your phrase, so if you have a 3 word phrase in a 500 word webpage then this phrase should appear between 3 to 10 times. These are very general rules of thumb and there is no keyword magic number here, also remember that the content should be written for real people whilst being aware of keyword density in order to balance
usability with search engine optimization.

Google PageRank

Google Pagerank is achieved by having links into your webpage, simply stated the more links you have the higher your PageRank. Note: each page has a unique Google PR although in practice it is usually the home page that has the highest. All links to your webpage are not equal, in terms of determining their value in increasing your Google PR. The higher the PR of the page linking to yours as well as the number of links from that page will determine the value of the link to your PR. Basically fewer with a high PR are good for you. The relevancy (to a search term) of the linking page is also an important weighting factor for the links value. If the link is from a gardening site and you are software testing company then the link is not worth that much, in terms of boosting your own PR. Context is also key; there are many websites on the net that give an overview of how PR is calculated based on incoming links.

Notes: The term mortgage is a highly competitive search term and only PR 5 or higher webPages are displayed in the top 10. Google PR on its own, however, does not determine the actual ranking, other factors are clearly involved. We will now look at the other major ranking factors.

Webpage Age

If you search for Software Quality Assurance on Google you will see, in the top 5, the following webpage: - www.well.com/~vision/sqa.html. This page has not been changed since 2001 and contains very little content, mostly links to other sites. This page was, however, created in 1993 and we believe that the age of this site is the primary reason for its high placing in the search engine results.

A good question, that will be the subject of another UZilla.org article is Can Webpage age be inherited via the registration of an expired domain?

Webpage and Domain name

If the search term is embedded somewhere in the URL of the webpage then this will assist the webpage ranking order for that search term. If you search journeys end on Google (done on 12th July) the following top 3 WebPages are returned:-