Tag Archive for website ranking

06 Jun 2009
internet marketing • seo

SEO Factors That Affect Search Engine Rankings


One of my favorite blogs is seodesignsolutions – they have some of the best information on SEO services and Internet marketing around!  Anyway, a recent post titled “8 SEO Ranking Factors” gives an excellent explanation of 8 very important factors that can affect the ranking of a website.  Here’s an overview of that article.

The 8 ranking factors they talk about are…

1) Anchor Text Keyword Preference
2) Determining the Threshold of Your Competitors Market Saturation
3) Understanding Deep Links and Internal Link Optimization
4) Assess Ability and Crawl Ability
5) Emphasis of a Primary, Plural and Secondary Keywords for Meta Data
6) Uniqueness of Content and Differentiation via Block Segment Diversity
7) Off Page Ranking Factor
8) Quantifying the Amount of Time it Takes to Measure Results

A summary of each of these 8 ranking factors…

1) Anchor Text Keyword Preference
The article reports that internal anchor text accounts for 50% of the websites reputation.  So, if you can control the anchor text linking internally, then you will gain ground in your ability to rank higher in the search engines.  This means using anchor text linking within the content of your website pages to link to other pages within your website.

2) Determining the Threshold of Your Competitors Market Saturation
Basically, the article points out that you can use a guideline of sorts to determine the amount of competition you’ll be up against with a keyword phrase.  Their guideline is as follows…

Type in your keyword phrase in quotes to get the search results

New websites – use keywords with less than 50,000 search results
Optimized websites – use keywords with 100,000 to 300,000 search results
Older authoritative sites – can market most any keywords

3) Understanding Deep Links and Internal Link Optimization
Everyone who owns a website and is trying to market their site wants Deep Links (these are links from other websites to internal pages of your own website).  But they are often difficult to obtain.  So, what a web site owner can do is to utilize internal linking (like the anchor text linking mentioned above) to market and promote their own pages.

4) Assess Ability and Crawl Ability
The article reports that half of the ranking game is all about making sure that the website pages are able to be crawled by the search engines.  Using proper site architecture, clean coding and user friendly techniques on website pages is an extremely important SEO factor.

5) Emphasis of a Primary, Plural and Secondary Keywords for Meta Data
The use of a variety of semantic phrases in the body of content as well as in anchor text linking will help to ensure that a website page will rank not only for one keyword phrase but for multiple variations of the keyword phrase.  So, instead of just ranking for one keyword phrase, the page will rank for a variety of forms of that keyword phrase.

6) Uniqueness of Content and Differentiation via Block Segment Diversity
No matter what code is used to create your website (html, cold fusion, php, etc) the two main factors that affect ranking is the code to text ratio and the text to link ratio.  So, in order to make sure that there is more text (content) than code on your website pages the designer should use as lean a coding as possible (hence the reason for code cleanups in the SEO process).

7) Off Page Ranking Factor
Who links to you, what their status is in the search engines and the words they use to link to you with are very important factors when it comes to ranking.

8) Quantifying the Amount of Time it Takes to Measure Results
So often I’m asked, can’t you just do the SEO and then leave the website alone?  Why do we have to pay a monthly maintenance?  Oh, how I wish I could just do it once and then walk away.  But the truth is, if I’m going to do the work right, it has to be done continuously.  It’s the analytics that tell you what’s working, what’s not and it’s a constant process of change that takes place on websites.  There is no way around it.

To read the entire article and more information on each of these ranking factors, visit SEO Design Solutions today.


eckweb | 2 comments | Tags: , , , , ,
19 Aug 2008
internet marketing • seo • small business

Search Engine Rankings – How Important Are They?


So many of my clients are reliant on the search engine rankings report, it seems to be the most popular report that is viewed on the list of monthly reports that I provide my clients.

But is it REALLY indicative of how the website is doing? In short, NO!!

So, why do I provide my clients with a search engine rankings report? Because it’s the report they are most familiar with. Especially if they have been with another SEO firm in the past. Many SEO firms provide this report (as their only report) to their clients on a regular basis. Some monthly, some quarterly.

I’ll tell you why I think it’s not important and I’ll compare the information from the search engine rankings report to the information that I provide on the other reports. I’ll let you decide if I’m right or wrong.

1) I’ve recently been working very hard on a client’s website to market him onto the first page of Google for the phrase “name tags” (without the quotes). Obviously, well, maybe not so obviously, but the phrase “name tags” is extremely competitive. Over 45 million in total searches and over 1.4 million in allintitle searches.

I have succeeded in getting him onto the first page of Google, occasionally. This means that when I checked Google 20 minutes ago, his site was #7. Yesterday it was also #7 between 11 AM and 1 PM, but the rest of the day it was on page 12. So, if I ran a search engine rankings report between 11 AM and 1 PM yesterday, that report would show his site at #7 in Google, where in reality, for the majority of the day, the website is on page 12 in Google.

The search engine rankings report is ONLY a snapshot of where the website is at the moment the report is run. Yes, it takes 15-30 minutes to run a report and I honestly don’t know if the numbers are obtained at the beginning or the end of the run (I would assume the end), but either way, it’s just a snapshot of that moment in time. So, in my opinion, it’s not relevant to the overall success of the Internet marketing campaign.

2) The Traffic Analysis report I provide my clients with is a summary of the amount and type of traffic that comes through the website. In that monthly report I list the total number of visitors, the total number of unique visitors, websites that refer traffic, search engines that refer traffic, website pages that are visited the most, and those that are visited the least. I also list the top 3 keyword phrases that are bringing in traffic. I will tell you that 95% of the time, the keyword phrases that bring in the most traffic are phrases the Client NEVER thought of.

3) The Competition Report I provide my clients with is new. I take a keyword phrase the client is marketing and I compare their website to an online competitors. Sometimes the competitor rankings higher, sometimes lower, depending on the keyword phrase (and the time of the search) but the point of this report is to give my client an idea of what their online competitor is doing. After all, if my competitor has 59 pages on their website, all indexed and marketable, and I only have 23 pages on my website – well, chances are my competitor is getting more traffic. How much more traffic? Where is the traffic coming from? I want to know and my client should know as well.

4) Hot Keyword Phrases is a report that I love to create. Each month I give my clients 3 new keyword phrases targeted to their audience and of course, phrases that they are currently not marketing. The idea is to add information to the website, to a blog, to a newsletter, whatever!! The target audience is searching for these keyword phrases. The only way to get that group typing in these phrases is to associate these phrases with the website.

5) Tips Suggestions and Ideas is a report that is based almost entirely on the website statistics. I scrutinize the statistics to see how the website visitors are maneuvering through the website. What pages are they leaving in droves from? What buttons are being clicked on and which ones are not? What pages are being viewed least often and why? What percentage of people come to a website page and then just leave? And how does the online competitor handle the same situations? This report obviously takes the most time, but honestly, it’s great analyzing all this data. Sort of SEO CSI!

It takes anywhere from 3-5 hours to gather all this information, per client, so it’s not an easy task but if I want my clients to benefit from SEO, this is what I need to do. This is what I would want my SEO firm to do for me.

All these reports other than the search engine rankings report, provide the client with SO much more information, and relevant, useful information! This data, analyzed and acted on, is really what will help propel the website into generating the type of traffic your business deserves.

So, if your SEO firm is providing you with this information, learn to read it. Ingest it! If you have questions about the information, contact your SEO firm. They will be delighted that you’re actually reading the information they work so hard to provide you with.

If your SEO firm does not provide you with this information, contact us at Eckweb Designs, Inc. We’ll be happy to work with you and your website!


eckweb | No comments | Tags: , ,
17 Jul 2008
internet marketing • seo • small business

Getting Ranked For Competitive Keyword Phrases


Well, today is a great day!

About 6 months ago we (Eckweb Designs, Inc.) signed a contract with a new client who sells Name Tags among other products. He had been using another SEO firm for a few years and he was not seeing the kind of results that he wanted.

His main complaint was that he was not on the first page of Google for the very competitive keyword phrase of “name tags”.

So, we cleaned up his website coding, did some keyword research and optimized his website pages. We also encouraged him to write articles and we’d submit them to article sites, blogs, etc. In other words, we did what we do for every one of our clients.

Well, 6 months later, his website is #7 in Google for the phrase “name tags”!! How exciting is that? We’ve been doing SEO since 2000 but still, to this day, it’s still so exciting and wonderful to see how our hard work pays off. We immediately called our client and he was elated, to say the least.

So, if your SEO firm is telling you it will be impossible to get top rankings for your keyword phrases (and I’m not saying that every phrase is possible) you should take a moment and make sure that the SEO firm is doing all that they can do to get you that ranking. After all what are you paying them for?


eckweb | No comments | Tags: ,