Google Secrets – How to Get a Top 10 Ranking…

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Chapter 5 - Optimizing Your Web Pages

Now that you know how to structure your site and pages, you next need to optimize those pages for Google. As such, this chapter is quite important – in fact, this is the meat of the matter where many search engine optimizers (SEOs) tend spend the majority of their time on.

Put another way, this chapter discusses those aspects and elements of web pages that determine relevancy in Google.

Specifically, Google checks if and how keywords that match a search query are used on pages on your website AND on pages on other websites that link to your site.

Tip: Not just HTML pages need to be optimized. If your Web site contains PDF or Word files, these too must be optimized. Google will index all files on your Web server that it can find, and these will be included in the overall site ranking algorithm.

Keyword Factors Used in the Algorithm

The following factors play a part in the portion of the Google algorithm that determines page relevancy. Google looks at the following keyword factors and assigns a relevancy score for each page of your site. The factors are listed in approximate order of importance, however, like all factors in the Google algorithm, this is subject to change.

Keyword Proximity

Google looks at individual words that make up phrases. Keyword proximity is a measure of word order and closeness. The closer all words in a keyword phrase are together, and in the correct order, the better.

Obviously, exact matches score the best. As an example, say someone does a search on “country house plans”. Google will assign a higher score if your page contains “country house plans” than if it contains “country and farm house plans”. For the latter, all three words are contained on the page, so the page would receive some score, but since this is an inexact match (there are words in between “country and “house”), the page score would be lower than for the exact match of country house plans.

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