Friday, April 01, 2005
Fun with SEO
Today was a good day. I got a start on my next module of One Stop Web Support, namely the free ebooks I plan on offering, but most of the day went to search engine optimization on MasterVisions.
I targeted some key pages that are well optimized for moderately competitive keywords (100 to 1000 searches per day), but have never gotten ranked higher than the third page of search results. Since they were already pretty well optimized, I focused on comparing our pages to the top five ranked pages for those keywords and found some interesting patterns.
Most of the top ranking pages, at least for the keywords I'm targeting, make little use of heading text and usually target any heading text specifically on the keywords. Meta descriptions were surprisingly short (although I doubt that meta descriptions—long or short—have much influence on ranking). And keyword prominence in general was less crucial than I've found it to be in the past.
Are the search engine algorithms now considering keywords right at the beginning of an area as a sign of manipulation? I can see that finding the keyword right at the beginning of every type of area would raise a red flag for the spider that someone was trying to target that keyword.
I'll have to do some more research on that.
I rearranged the focus of the pages a bit and will compare them against the top ranking pages again tomorrow to see if I'm closer to their parameters. Then comes the waiting for the spiders to reevaluate and re-rank them.
Well, there's plenty else to do in the meantime—both with my site and MasterVisions. But it was fun digging into the research again.
Jeff
Today was a good day. I got a start on my next module of One Stop Web Support, namely the free ebooks I plan on offering, but most of the day went to search engine optimization on MasterVisions.
I targeted some key pages that are well optimized for moderately competitive keywords (100 to 1000 searches per day), but have never gotten ranked higher than the third page of search results. Since they were already pretty well optimized, I focused on comparing our pages to the top five ranked pages for those keywords and found some interesting patterns.
Most of the top ranking pages, at least for the keywords I'm targeting, make little use of heading text and usually target any heading text specifically on the keywords. Meta descriptions were surprisingly short (although I doubt that meta descriptions—long or short—have much influence on ranking). And keyword prominence in general was less crucial than I've found it to be in the past.
Are the search engine algorithms now considering keywords right at the beginning of an area as a sign of manipulation? I can see that finding the keyword right at the beginning of every type of area would raise a red flag for the spider that someone was trying to target that keyword.
I'll have to do some more research on that.
I rearranged the focus of the pages a bit and will compare them against the top ranking pages again tomorrow to see if I'm closer to their parameters. Then comes the waiting for the spiders to reevaluate and re-rank them.
Well, there's plenty else to do in the meantime—both with my site and MasterVisions. But it was fun digging into the research again.
Jeff
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