See all previous articles
The Axandra newsletter archive
4 June 2002
WEEKLY SEARCH ENGINE FACTS
http://www.Axandra.com
Issue #6 - June 4, 2002
Copyright 2002 Axandra / Voget Selbach Enterprises GmbH
Hello!
As you probably know by now, we conducted a high search engine ranking study and analyzed 103,260 top 10 Web pages on six search engines to find out what it takes to get a high ranking.
Today, we tell you about a major finding in our study on the search engine AllTheWeb / FAST Search (www.alltheweb.com).
1. Facts of the week: The importance of H1 tags on AllTheWeb
The location of keywords on a Web page is one of the main rules how search engines rank Web pages. Web pages with the search terms appearing in the Web page title are often more relevant to the topic than other pages.
Search engines also check to see if the search terms appear near the top of a Web page, such as in the headline. They assume that any Web page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.
In the study on AllTheWeb, we discovered that the H1 tag (used for big headlines) plays a major role in getting a top ranking. 17.16% of the #1 Web pages on AllTheWeb used the queried search term in their H1 headline tags(*). This is a very high result for a single ranking factor.
Unfortunately, H1 tags look very ugly in today's Web design. Here's a nice tutorial on how you can use style sheets and font tags to make H1 headlines look better:
http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/tutorial_2001-4.shtml
If you're interested to learn the average length of H1 headlines, the average search term density and the position of search terms in H1 headlines, you should take a look at our search engine ranking reports.
(*) Source:
Search Engine Ranking Studies Q2/2002
http://www.axandra.com/search-engine-studies/index.htm
2. 19 common mistakes that prevent your Web site from getting top rankings on search engines - Part 5 of 19
Is your Web site not getting listed in search engines? Is your Web site listed but it's not getting top rankings? In our series we tell you the 19 common mistakes for low or no ranking and what you can do about it.
Reason #5: You overuse keywords on your Web site.
Many search engines fear to be spammed if you overuse keywords on your Web site. Do not repeat your keywords too often in your meta tags or in the body of your Web pages.
Nobody knows the magic number for the search engines but a paragraph such as the one below is not a good idea:
"Ebooks are great. I love ebooks. I've read hundreds of ebooks. You can learn much from ebooks. On my Web site you can find tons of free ebooks. When you subscribe to my newsletter on ebooks, you get two additional free ebooks."
Some years ago, you may have obtained a top ranking for the keyword "ebooks", but today the search engines will quickly ignore such nonsense and probably write it off as "spamming". It could even cause the engine spider to skip your Web site completely.
Unfortunately, search engines do not indicate on their help pages the maximum allowed number of repetitions. Some webmasters suspect this to be three, some say six. There's no way of knowing until you are penalised.
Further webmaster discussion about keywords:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum.cgi?ran=956&forum=8&show=60
3. Previous articles
Search term density on AltaVista
https://newsletter.seoprofiler.com/newsletter5.htm
Robots.txt on 6 search engines
https://newsletter.seoprofiler.com/newsletter4.htm
Teoma and reciprocal links:
https://newsletter.seoprofiler.com/newsletter3.htm
Web site age on Google and AltaVista:
https://newsletter.seoprofiler.com/newsletter2.htm
4. Recommended resources
* BestWebSites.com about the webmaster software ARELIS 2.3:
"Axandra's Reciprocal Links Solution automatically finds suitable Web sites for webmasters, sorts them by relevancy and lists them for review. This allows webmasters to concentrate only on the Web sites that will bring them very targeted traffic. A built-in email editor and tested email templates help ARELIS users to contact Web site owners with customized email messages."
Version 3.0 is planned to be released in about 1-2 weeks. Buy ARELIS now and you'll get version 3.0 for free.
Download the free trial version now:
http://www.Axandra.com/download.htm
* Check your popularity today!
The freeware program " Link Popularity Check " has received numerous good ratings because it offers a fast and easy way to check your link popularity on five search engines at once:
http://www.CheckYourLinkPopularity.com
* We pay you up to US$139.98!
Our 2-tier affiliate program pays you 35% + 10% for the sale of our products:
http://www.Axandra.com/affiliates.htm
* Marketing Web sites that we use
http://www.axandra.com/webmaster-resources/index.htm
Please recommend this issue to anyone you know who is interested in search engine facts. It's a good way to stay in touch with your clients, too.
If you're receiving this issue as a forward, and would like to get your own free subscription, visit
http://www.Axandra.com/subscribe.htm
Back issues:
https://newsletter.seoprofiler.com
Copyright 2002 Axandra / Voget Selbach Enterprises GmbH
Free content for your own website
You can publish the articles of our newsletters on your own web site as long as you follow some simple rules:
- The articles must not be changed.
- The links in the articles must remain intact.
- You must add the following link below the article:
That's all. Improve your web pages with our free content!
| 
"Highly recommended!"
