Is my understanding correct?

manse · 05-27-2004, 04:38 AM

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me if my current understanding of the best approach to seo is correct?

1. When a search term is entered into a search engine, a list is compiled of any pages which are relevant to this term. Relevancy is determined by a combination of meta tag content, title, description, content, link working, alt tags etc.

2. This relevant list is returned by the search engine in order of :

a. Page Rank and then …
b. Search phrase relevancy

So if I have a low Page Rank at the moment, I should optimize my pages for search terms which are likely to return smaller number of results since my high relevancy to the term will give me a chance of appearing on pages 1-3 albeit with less traffic.

As my Page Rank increases, I can re-optimize for the more competitive terms and thereby expect more traffic.

Grateful for anyone’s confirmation of my reading of the situation or correction.

michaeljl · 05-27-2004, 05:32 AM

1. Relevancy is that which the programmers of the particular search engine programs to be relevant. Each of the things you mention are factors, but different importance is assigned to different factors by different search engines.

2. "PageRank" is only used by Google and is just an algorithm to determine "popularity" of a particular web page. Other search engines may or may not use a similar algorithm. Right now for Google, PR doesn't count as much as anchor text relevancy when it returns search results.

Relevant lists are returned by different search engines based on different interpretations of relevancy.

Optimizing "on page" may improve your search engine ranking position for less competitive terms.

RonHollingsworth · 05-27-2004, 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by manse

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me if my current understanding of the best approach to seo is correct?

1. When a search term is entered into a search engine, a list is compiled of any pages which are relevant to this term. Relevancy is determined by a combination of meta tag content, title, description, content, link working, alt tags etc.

Yeah sure this may be true with search engines like Yahoo however michaeljl right when he says that IBL carry more weight with Google. Don't even worry about PR. Get your incoming links. That's all you need to focus on. The PR will come.

eCommando · 06-03-2004, 03:38 PM

I think Yahoo is starting to use backlinks for ranking; probably not as much a Google though. Yahoo seem to be more concentrated on onpage optimization. So if you want to rank well on both, you need to really balance the optimization to not trip the Google filters.

RonHollingsworth · 06-03-2004, 03:43 PM

I doubt it'll trip a filter. If you optimize for Google then you're about 98% optimized for Yahoo. I mean come on, who isn't optimizing the on-page elements anymore?

eCommando · 06-03-2004, 05:24 PM

I have some sites where the serp ranking goes up when I take out the keywords on the page; the more i take out, the higher it gets. So I eventually took out all the keywords and it's ranked #1 for that keyword now.

disgust · 06-05-2004, 04:37 AM

"2. This relevant list is returned by the search engine in order of :

a. Page Rank and then …
b. Search phrase relevancy "

pagerank has little to nothing to do with the SERPs directly.

if this were the case and on page things didn't matter, then only the PR10/PR9 sites would show up on searches