Key Factors That Affect Web Site's Ranking

[ccb056]

http://www.qoolventure.com/keyword.htm

Key Factors That Affect Web Site's Ranking
Search engine ranks a web site according to its relevancy to the searched keywords. It always assign"points" to web sites based on some predefined criteria. Most engines grade the placement of keywords and phrases on your web site based on these factors.

* Keyword prominence
* Keyword frequency
* Keyword density
* Keyword proximity
* Keyword placement

Keyword Prominence
How early the keywords appear in a web site will show how important it is to the web site. The very first element in HTML that can contain keywords is in the site's Title tag. Besides, search engines also pay special attention on the first 25 words of the body text. As a result, keyword-rich body text should be presented early in the HTML organization of the web page in order to catch more search engine attention.

Keyword frequency
One way that a search engine determines if a web page is about a particular keyword or phrase is by looking to see how frequently the keyword or phrase appears on the page, which is called keyword frequency.

Although it is an important factor, you shouldn't go overboard, because many engines will penalize you for spamming or keyword stuffing if you repeat a word too many times. As a rule, we include the targed keyword phrase once in the keyword META tag and once or twice in the site's Title tag as well as a few in body text.

Keyword density
The number of keywords appearing on a web page compared with athe total number of words appearing on that is how keyword density is measured. Keyword density is often measured in different areas of the web page, for example META tag, Title tag, body text etc.

A higher keyword density shows that the particular keyword is very important to the web page and it catches more search engine attention. As a rule, a keyword density between 5 - 7 percent will be good enough.

Keyword proximity
The placement of keywords on a web page in relation to each other, or in some cases in relation to words with similar meanings to the queried keyword, is measured in keyword proximity. For search engines that grade a keyword match by keyword proximity, the connected phrase "singapore hosting" will outrank a citation that mentions "singapore web hosting" if you are searching only for the phrase "singapore hosting".

Keyword Placement
The search engines believe where and in what HTML your targeted keywords or phrases are placed is a good indicator of what a web page is about. This is called keyword placement. Over the time, keywords found in certain HTML prove to be more reliable at indicating ther true content of a web document, for example Title tag, body text, hyperlinks, Image tags, etc.

Generally speaking, the search engines are looking for a theme. In order to attain a good ranking in a search engine, the targeted keyword must be included in more area of the page with proper position and density.

Frederick Goh '2003

I found this to be very useful when choosing keywords and their placement.

[Will.Spencer]

My testing has show the "Keyword prominence" theory to be a myth.

Keyword placement is very important. The places to make sure you have your keywords are in the title, in the <H1> tag, in <H2> tags, and in <b> tags.

But... also extremely important is the filename of the URL. That really punishes PHP sites. Of course, you can do some fancy work-arounds with mod_rewrite.

I've written more in the Internet Search Engines FAQ.

[ccb056]

yes, filenames\domain names are a factor in where you place, but perhaps the largest factor is the number and quality of your inbound links.

[ponpots]

Well explained...

Now a days ANchor Text and Link Popularity plays a vital role...