GOLDEN RULE of Search Engine Marketing

"To Achieve a Top Position in a Particular Search Engine, Analyze What Other High-Ranking Web Pages Have Done!"

If there is one rule that should be referred back to as the refrain in search engine positioning, it is this:

The best way to move up the search result list is to learn what kinds of things affect your rankings and then analyze the pages of those that ranked higher than yours for real clues on how you can achieve a higher ranking.

Search engines change their ranking algorithms from time to time. A page in your Web site that earned a top ranking last week might drop in the rankings a few months later. Then, left untouched, that same page could climb right back into its old search position awhile later, although this is unlikely to happen by chance.

The trick to always being on top is to learn the variables that can be influenced and analyze the contents of the top Web sites to see what they're doing better than you. Literally, click on their listings, visit their site and select "view" from the pull-down menu in Netscape and then the "Document Source" selection on that menu. You can do the same in Internet Explorer. This allows you to view the actual HTML code that makes up their page.

Ask yourself, "Is a particular keyword more prominent in their title tag than in mine?" and "is a particular keyword more prominent?" You should also consider whether it is repeated more often in their description META tag or in the actual copy that makes up their page than on my Web site.

Perhaps they are using the keyword in the heading tags, or maybe keywords appear in hyperlinks to other internal pages or some other way that you had not considered or are not using. This is the proven way to isolate the variables and climb ahead of other sites in search engines.

Specific Techniques to Increase Relevancy

Now that you understand the variables you control for keyword placement within your Web pages, here are techniques and applications where you must apply those keywords. Each will help you gain a footing and climb toward the top of the rankings in the search engines. Each technique is presented independently and will not work for every search engine. After this overview of techniques, you will need to read the search engine by search engine descriptions to learn which techniques work for which engines.