Tryangled Solutions web designing tips tricks

The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether. Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. Google is opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page. General directories will be showing up less and less in exchange for topic-specific directories. Additionally, sites with a central theme carried throughout the majority of pages will tend to rank over sites with a specific page or even section on a topic.

Internal links are carrying a solid weight in attaching relevancy to specific internal pages. Properly worded internal links, preferably built into the content of your site (see note on natural links above) will add weight to those internal pages and increase the likelihood of those pages ranking for specific secondary phrases.

Most of the search engines return results with confidence or relevancy rankings.  In other words, they list the hits according to how closely they think the results match the query.  However, these lists often leave users shaking their heads on confusion, since, to the user, the results may seem completely irrelevant.

Why does this happen?  Basically it’s because search engine technology has not yet reached the point where humans and computers understand each other well enough to communicate clearly.

Most search engines use search term frequency as a primary way of determining whether a document is relevant.  If you’re researching diabetes and the word “diabetes” appears multiple times in a Web document, it’s reasonable to assume that the document will contain useful information.  Therefore, a document that repeats the word “diabetes” over and over is likely to turn up near the top of your list.

If your keyword is a common one, or if it has multiple other meanings, you could end up with a lot of irrelevant hits.  And if your keyword is a subject about which you desire information, you don’t need to see it repeated over and over–it’s the information about that word that you’re interested in, not the word itself.

Some search engines consider both the frequency and the positioning of keywords to determine relevancy, reasoning that if the keywords appear early in the document, or in the headers, this increases the likelihood that the document is on target.  For example, one method is to rank hits according to how many times your keywords appear and in which fields they appear (i.e., in headers, titles or plain text).  Another method is to determine which documents are most frequently linked to other documents on the Web.  The reasoning here is that if other folks consider certain pages important, you should, too.

If you use the advanced query form on AltaVista, you can assign relevance weights to your query terms before conducting a search.  Although this takes some practice, it essentially allows you to have a stronger say in what results you will get back.

As far as the user is concerned, relevancy ranking is critical, and becomes more so as the sheer volume of information on the Web grows.  Most of us don’t have the time to sift through scores of hits to determine which hyperlinks we should actually explore. The more clearly relevant the results are, the more we’re likely to value the search engine.

I don’t think it’s about philosophy. It’s about getting people what they need, and about getting the results to be as accurate and fast as possible. We’re innovating, and concentrating just on the relevancy of results. Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm.

What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is the hyper-linked text that allows the user to move around web sites.

Anchor Text Relevancy

From a search engine stand point it is important that the anchor text be relevant to the information that it points to. If it is it can improve your ranking in the search engines. So for example if your web site is dedicated to selling exercise videos and the page that you are going to point to has numerous articles on exercise videos then you have a high relevancy.

To achieve even higher relevancy make sure that the integrity of the document that your pointing to has been marked up with those same anchor text phrases. I.E. The page title of the page you are going to is called “exercise videos” and your anchor text is the same.

What Not To Do:

It is a common mistake to see people use “click here” in anchor text. In doing this you are loosing many possible users. Instead use descriptive anchor text phrases that are relevant to the subject matter.