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Search engines index the words from the documents they find on the World Wide Web. For some reason, many SEOs act as though they have forgotten that search engine technology is first and foremost concerned with where to find documents that use and are meaningful to the queries that searchers use. Search engine query resolution is still a very primitive technology because it is driven by the exactness of the words that searchers use.
Web page content not only provides information to the people looking for information, but also for search engines. Search engines can only crudely measure the value of words found on Web documents. They cannot easily determine which words are the most important and valuable words to a given document, but they look for hints. The more content you provide, the more information about your content the search engines can accumulate.
One widely documented fact is that the words you use in your title element have an impact on your search engine results. Search engines elevate the importance of words used in title elements. It is assumed that your title element accurately describes the purpose and content of your document. Search engines also display the title elements in their search results. Hence, a compelling and informative title element is more generally useful than one that merely informs or doesn't say anything helpful.
Search engines also look at how you emphasize the text on your pages. Why do you bold certain words and expressions if they are not more important to you than other words and expressions? Why do you use italics for emphasis if you don't want to stress the importance of the concept? Why do you use certain words in outbound link anchor text than others? Why do you use one expression in your H2 and H3 title elements? The choices you make for words to emphasize above the other words in your content reveal something about what is most important to you. Think of what the search engines do with their emphasis analysis as akin to reading the body language of a document.
How you organize your content is another factor the search engines consider. Your navigational content may be consistently placed in one corner of each document. Important links to other parts of your Web site may be consistently placed in one margin of each document. Each document may have a logical structure that helps the visitor find important information. If a search engine can determine where to look for important information across many different types of Web pages, it stands a better chance of determining which documents are most relevant to a query. The easiest way to filter out unimportant content is to look for common practices across a multitude of Web sites. Your individual preferences may differ slightly from many other people's preferences, but a large number of people may do the same things consistently.
What documents your content links to tells the search engines what other content is important to you. It also tells the search engines what content you feel may be relevant or meaningful to your visitors. Search engines learn to associate contents or topics with each other by the way many documents associate themselves with those topics.
The idea that if one is good for me, more may be better is usually deemed to be a fallacy. For example, if you are taking a prescription medicine once a day, as you feel better, you may be tempted to think that taking more than one dose per day can help even more. But many medications will damage or poison your body if you take too many doses too quickly. You may also feel that while driving to work at the speed limit provided on your road systems is good for you, driving even faster is better. And yet, the faster you drive, the more difficult it is to control your vehicle in the event you need to stop suddenly, swerve to avoid a collision, or hit an expectedly slick or damaged portion of road surface.
However, in today's world of primitive search engine indexing more often is better. The more times you use a word on a page, the more times you emphasize that word, the more ways you emphasize that word, the more important it seems to be to your content overall. The more important a word is to your content, the more relevant that word seems to be to your content.
Just because a particular word is highly relevant to your document does not mean that your document is highly relevant to that word. Relevance is determined on more than one basis. A search engine attempts to return documents that are most relevant to a query. A search engine judges relevance on the basis of many factors, including which documents link to a document and which other documents that document links to. The relevance of other pages is not passed through linkage, but rather is passed through the linking relationship. That is, a page that contains a great deal of content about "dog grooming" may associate itself with another page about "dog grooming" by linking to that page with the anchor text "John Smith's Web site". The anchor text does not show a relationship between the topics of the two pages, but by examining both documents, search engines can see that "dog grooming" is very important to both.
Search engines also look at lists of resources. Suppose you have a document that links to 20 other documents, all of which are about "dog grooming". Your document is a useful resource for identifying documents that discuss "dog grooming". It does not matter if those 20 other documents all come from your Web site. They are still relevant to "dog grooming", as is your list of documents. Hence, your document resource list is relevant to "dog grooming" and it shows a search engine what other "dog grooming" documents are important. Weighting documents by importance is a difficult operation because the search engines cannot be sure of which document resource pages are created only for the benefit of document creators rather than for visitors.
One way to make a document resource page more valuable is to provide information about the other documents it links to. In this way, the document becomes more relevant to its topic and it also becomes more reliable in its description of the other documents. The association between the resource page and the other documents is more trustworthy.
Michael Martinez has actively and successfully engineered high-ranking content for numerous Web sites since first becoming involved in SEO in 1998. Michael's content services are outlined at the SEO Consulting Web site.