Improving search engine rankings is something that all webmasters want, but few know how to achieve. It’s a function of your ability to understand what people are looking for in your niche and how well you fill that need.
Your search engine ranking is solely related to how well search engine statistical mathematical formulas known as algorithms rate the content of each of your web pages. If they don’t understand what the search engines are looking for and don’t understand algorithmic mathematical statistical analysis, they are likely to fail compared to someone who does.
So what are these algorithms? They are formulas used by what is commonly known as search engine spiders; pieces of software that crawl your website from top left to bottom right, skipping those parts they don’t understand. They review your semantics, or word usage, to make sure your text is relevant enough to each page’s topic to meet the needs of those to whom the search engine will present your page.
How do these so-called spiders know what the topic of each of your web pages is? Of your SEO. From the title page, the headers that are placed in the H1 tags and by other means by which you can make it clear to a mathematical equation what your site is about and how well you are providing the required information. If a Google user (for example) uses the search term “make my own jewelry”, then the Google algorithm will search for that exact term in their text.
It will look for it in your title, in your header, and at least at the beginning and end of your web page text. However, if you encounter the keyword too often, your web page may be demoted as the algorithm will have a calculated word density considered as normal in speech and writing. You can detect excessive usage that might be designed only to provide a higher position on the list and provide the opposite: a lower position. However, using text that is semantically related to the keyword will work in your favor and help you achieve a higher listing. That’s what Google mistakenly calls LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing. LSA, or Latent Semantic Analysis, would be closer to contextual marking.
If you don’t know these things, it’s unlikely that your web page will reach the position in the search engine listings for a specific search term (keyword) that you want it to be. You have to know what it takes to achieve what you want to achieve. However, semantics is only a small part of it. Your internal navigation links are also involved. Most people think that these are simply to allow visitors to navigate through your website and get to the pages they want to read. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Search engines use your navigation links to determine the relative importance you have given to each of your web pages. The most linked are the most important and vice versa for the least linked. Your link structure is very important, and there are tricks that can be used to maximize this. There is even a mathematical formula that can be used to optimize each web page to maximize your chances of receiving a high listing.
External links are also important, although long gone are the days when many reciprocal links would give you a nice listing. Reciprocal links can have a negative effect on your listing position unless you know exactly what you are doing and how to calculate the relative utility of each link to your web page.
Improving search engine rankings is not easy to achieve for a beginner, or even an experienced internet marketer, unless they understand how search engine algorithms work and what they are looking for. Find that, and you have the battle pretty much won.
