Keywords and Stuffing Penalties
To optimize your keywords, put them within different tags while minimizing the possibility of being penalized for keyword stuffing. “…search engines can lower your search ranking result if they think that you’re keyword stuffing, or putting too many instances of the keywords on your web page” (Belew & Elad, 2009). In some search engines, adding keywords throughout different kinds of tags will increase your page ranking for keyword searches without causing a penalty for keyword stuffing. Repeating keywords in the title also will improve organic search results, but the most important aspect of a page title is to accurately represent the content of the page in a comprehensible way. In determining the title for a given page both comprehensibility and the value of certain keywords must be taken into consideration. The actual presentation of the results will likely be represented by the content in the html title tag. We recommend that you place the name of the web site, the section, followed by the name of the specific content within that page. This approach will help to pair up pages from your web site on search engine results pages (SERPs). There’s a small set of meta-tags that Google gathers content from for its listing, but does not actually use in determining page rank. They don’t actually change organic search results, but they do effect how the content is displayed in search results. Include the use of these tags in the design of the site so that you can better direct how traffic comes into your site.
Non-reciprocal links (Backlinks)
The three largest players in the search engine market, Google, Bing, and Yahoo all use backlinks (non-reciprocal links) as their primary device for determining page rank. The more quality backlinks you can get, the more our page rank will improve. Because of the benefit of backlinks there has been the creation of networks of web sites that simply provide links to other sites in an attempt to improve the ranking of these other sites in organic search results. The sites that become part of these networks often get a low quality score inside the search engine’s ranking algorithm. The result of this is that having backlinks from these sites can lower your search engine rankings. To address this problem only attempt to get backlinks from web sites that currently perform reasonably well on search engine results pages and avoid using any kind of paid non-reciprocal linking service. To test whether or not a site has been banned, do a search for each site in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to see if the site shows up. If it doesn’t show up, that means that it has been banned and will only degrade your search result rankings to get a non-reciprocal link from it. Search engines downgrade search results if they notice your website getting a lot of backlinks all at once. Building backlinks is something that should be done slowly so that search engines don’t mistakenly interpret our success in acquiring backlinks as evidence of joining a network or using paid service.
One of the best ways to build non-reciprocal links is to submit your website for review by smaller search engines. “By increasing your mention in all the smaller search engines, you get more referrals to your web site, which leads to higher rankings on the Big Two search engines.” (Belew, S. & Elad, J. 2009) This same tactic also applies to non-English search engines such as Baidu (http://www.baidu.com/), Naver (http://www.naver.com/), and Yamli (http://www.yamli.com/).
By Jack Johnston MA TESOL, MBA, MSML