Keyword Ranking in Search Engines

Google has redesigned the infrastructure of it's search engine and is supposed to be online January 2010. It is supposed to be faster than the old version so your site's download speed will affect your rank.

Any keywords that won't fit in your title tag probably will not receive high keyword ranking. Putting keywords in the file name, the headers, first paragraph and bolded where appropriate will also help your ranking. Putting keywords in the anchor text in your menu and footer when linking to an internal page will help the ranking of the page they are linking to. Don't overdo one version of the word however or your page will be considered overoptimized, i.e., instead of "ranking&auot; mix it up with "rank" and related keywords. See more info on the Title Tag.

Google prefers quality links, i.e., sites with relevant content, not too many links on the page and also links from within the content of the page rank higher. Yahoo focuses more on quantity so if your keyword ranking is higher in Yahoo than Google you may need higher quality links. It is very hard to rank well in both engines. If you have put Capitals in File Names this can also affect your Keyword ranking as they appear as duplicate content to the search engines.

There are several factors that can cause your keyword rank to drop. Make sure your page or website isn't overoptimized first. If you only made changes trying to affect your keyword rank Google may drop your keyword rank temporarily as it keeps a record of all such changes. Wait a few weeks and it might come back. Another factor affecting your rank is that sites that had links to your site using those words may have gone offline or had their page rank demoted for some reason. Also Google started including Universal Results, i.e., news, videos and other items in the first and second pages of results, so if your rank dropped only a few places that might be the reason.

The higher ranking keywords have more competition so if your website is new, picking the most popular words is not good practice. For instance, I don't rank within top 100 in Google for "web design" because of the competition but just adding one more word enables me to rank on first page for most other combinations. Test the keywords to see which works best for you.

Google doesn't use the Meta Keyword Tag but most other search engines don't either. If you want to make sure put an obscure word in the keyword tag that isn't in the text of the page and see if you begin to rank for that word.

The most important keywords should be listed first in the title and repeated a few times in the first paragraph and you need more than one page featuring that word. You should spell out your keywords exactly as you expect people to search for them, i.e., your keywords (phrases) have to be in the title and you can't say "blue, green and purple widgets" and expect to rank well for all of them. You will likely rank well for the last one and not the first and second because it is next to the word widgets. It will look redundant to spell them all out but the other option is to not rank well for the others.

There has been considerable research on this topic and from what I can tell it has no affect on ranking. It is often used by search engines to list your site, however, so write it to attract visitors.

Along with having the page optimized for the keywords, as stated above, also add them to link titles and anchor text of other related pages on your website. Also submit your site to other websites and directories using those keywords in the link text.

You can only effectively target as many keywords as will fit in your title tag and there is usually a 65 character and space limit for the title tag. Use more general keywords for home page (widgets) and use more specialized keyword phrases on inside pages (purple widgets). If your keywords don't all fit in the title tag then you should consider starting another page and targeting the other keywords on that page or submit your site to other websites and directories using those words. However, keep in mind that the home page will usually have more PR (Page Rank), links and a better age factor than any other page on your website and thus more easily able to outrank your competitors than your inside pages.

That depends on if your page has a narrow focus. If you have room in your title for a misspelling then go for it, however, then your site will be frowned on for misspelling words.