How do you know what a search engine is really looking for?

By Brent Winters
Have you ever done a search and wondered how your competitors are appearing at the top of the results and why you are not? If so, you've taken the first crucial step into the intriguing world of Search Engine Optimization. An active curiosity will definitely serve you well in this field, paying huge dividends as you discover what makes each search engine tick.
The key factor to building a top-ranking page is to know what a search engine is looking for to determine each page's search position. Each engine is different, having its own unique set of preferences. Those in the business call this the search engine's "ranking algorithm."
So how do you know what each engine prefers to see? Start out by studying the pages that already rank near the top of the search results for the keywords you are targeting. What elements do the majority of these pages share in common? How are these pages different than the ones that appear further down the list? Don't look at the finished page in all its "graphical glory." Instead, view the HTML source code for each page. While it's not pretty to look at, this is what the search engine actually sees.
In your study, you might notice that the majority of the top-ranking pages contain the keyword in the page title. If you saw this, you could then reasonably deduce that the engine you're examining has a preference toward seeing the keyword in the title tag. Therefore, ensuring your pages also contain your best keywords in the title tag would move you one step closer to your goal.
Gone are the days of being able to propel your page to the top of the search results by simply changing one or two elements of your page. Today, you need to work on off-page factors like link popularity combined with on-page factors. To optimize on-page factors, you must ensure your page has similar elements in the HTML source code to other top ranking pages.
Am I saying that you should copy the content of your competitor's Web page and make it your own? Of course not. Rather than mimicking the actual wording of other top ranking pages, you should be trying to mimic the key statistical elements that the engine cares about. The closer that your page's statistics match what the search engine wants to see, the better chance you have of ranking highly.
So what are these "statistical elements" that influence rankings? They are such things as total word count, keyword count, and keyword prominence. Each of these elements are weighted differently for the various areas of the page such as the title tag, meta tags, heading tags, links, and so forth.
While you can compare your page to the number one ranked page for a given keyword, there are notable risks in this strategy. For example, if the page's content has changed since the search engine last indexed it, then what you are seeing does not accurately represent what the engine originally saw. You may see 3 keywords in the title tag and think that's what the engine wants, when it actually prefers only 1 instance of the keyword in the title. Since an engine may only re-index the page once every 3 to 8 weeks, the potential for the page's content to change during that time-period cannot be ignored.
In addition, the page you're looking at could be "cloaked." This is a technique used by some Webmasters where one page is served up to the search engine and a different page to everyone else. While this technique is often frowned upon by the search engines and can put you at risk of being penalized, it is still an all-too-common practice. Therefore, if the page you are looking at is cloaked, you are not seeing the same content that the engine saw.
What do you do to ensure you're getting an accurate picture? One common technique is to average the results. The idea is that most of the top ranking pages will be based upon the content that the engine saw. Therefore, an average of the top 5 or top 10 pages will give you a more reliable representation of what you should shoot for on your own page.
But, who has the time to carefully count each word on dozens of pages, for dozens of keywords and page areas, on multiple search engines? That's where having a good SEO tool becomes essential.
WebPosition Gold 3 offers a number of tools within the Page Critic module to specifically address these issues. Among other things, it offers three different kinds of page comparisons:
Compare your page to the Top 5 Page Averages: With this option, you can compare your Web page's vital statistics to the top 5 ranking pages across a wide array of keywords. The advantage of this technique is that since WebPosition analyzes hundreds of top ranking pages, the effect of individual cloaked or changed pages can be minimized. As there's less risk of "contamination" by changed or cloaked pages, I normally recommend people start with this option. These averages are computed and updated monthly as part of WebPosition's Page Critic Service so that the comparisons can be made instantly.
Compare your page to the Top X Ranking Pages for this Keyword search: More competitive keywords sometimes require a more focused approach. Rather than relying upon averages across keywords that have nothing to do with your industry, you can do a direct comparison for the keyword you are targeting. With this option checked, WebPosition will average the results of the top ranking pages for the keyword and engine you specify. This will tell you what your competition is using to gain their top placement.
While this strategy carries a little more risk of running into changed pages, it is much more focused, and therefore, can be more effective for competitive keywords. In addition, WebPosition contains proprietary technology to scan for indications of cloaked or changed pages. It will then recommend these pages be excluded from your analysis, thereby increasing the accuracy of your comparison. While there's no full-proof way to eliminate every cloaked or changed page, WebPosition Gold 3 performs several checks that go a long way toward accurate comparisons.
Compare your page to a list of pages: WebPosition's third comparison option gives you the ultimate in flexibility. You can choose to compare your page to simply the top-ranking page for your keyword, or even against a page on your own Web site. Or, you might focus your comparison to a specific list of pages, such as those occupying the 1st, 3rd, and 5th positions.
New to WebPosition Gold 3 are other accuracy improvement features such as the ability to exclude areas of the page that the engine is known to ignore. For example, why waste time optimizing the keyword meta tag for Google if Google is known to ignore that area of the page? Also new to Version 3 is the ability to ignore "noise words." Most search engines have a specific list of words it filters out such as "a, an, about, are, as," etc. If the engine does not index these "minor" words, then ideally you should ignore them as well.
As you become more proficient in SEO, you'll find WebPosition Gold 3's added power and flexibility in page analysis invaluable. Simple "search engine readiness checkers" may give you some basic pointers in regard to search engine optimization, but they will only take you so far. To truly compete in today's competitive environment, you must arm yourself with the "industrial strength" tools favored by search engine marketing professionals. Those tools include WebPosition Gold 3, WordTracker, and WebTrends.