You already know that search engines use complicated secret formulas, called ranking algorithms, to determine the order of their results. You even know that some of the most Eternally Important factors are your web page text and your HTML title tags. Now we're going to wrap what you already know into an organic optimization cheat sheet that you can peek at next time someone asks you, “What do search engines care about, anyway?”

But first, a disclaimer: There are radically differing opinions within the SEO community about what works and what's important. The SEO profession is an upstart one, with no degrees to be earned or widely accepted canon of literature (and if there were, it'd change every five months anyway). So we're all out there trying to figure this stuff out on our own, using different test cases, and chasing morphing search engines. We've distilled what we believe to be the best-of-the-best advice and present it here in a simplified form.

Here's the lowdown on the most important factors:

- HTML page title

- Visible HTML text on the page

- Inbound links (quality and quantity)

- Inbound link anchor text

- Age of domain

- Site authority

- Lesser factors

We'll get into how to optimize all of these factors in Part III. But for now, as you read through them, think about how much attention you've given to each of them on your own site. Maybe, like a lot of site owners, you've been focusing on the bottom of the list the least important factors more than the biggies at the top. As you think about what matters to the search engines, keep this in mind:

Pearl of Wisdom: Each page on your website is analyzed individually by the search engines.

That means each and every page is an opportunity to optimize for the following: HTML page title The HTML page title is today's hands-down leader, and an Eternally Important factor, in search engine ranking algorithms. As a bonus, optimizing your HTML page titles is one of those activities that will quickly affect the way your listings look in the search engines.

Visible HTML text on the page It seems obvious, but you would be surprised at how many site owners miss this simple point: In order to rank well for a particular set of keywords, your site text should contain them. True, there are examples of pages that rank well for words not actually appearing on the page (see the sidebar “Googlebombing and ‘Miserable Failure'”), but this is not something you want to leave to chance. You may see SEO pros insist that you need 250 or 1,000 words on a page and that 5–10 percent of these words must be your target keywords (SEO folks call that percentage keyword density).

We say this: As long as you have robot-readable text on your page (a great first step that many of your competitors, believe it or not, may have missed), you should use as many keywords as you need to state your message clearly and as many opportunities to insert keywords as makes sense within the realm of quality writing. Your marketing message is much too special to be put into a formula.

Inbound links (quality and quantity)

Coming in at #3 in our list of search engine ranking factors is inbound links to your website. Why are inbound links so important in the search engine ranking algorithms? Because they can indicate a page's quality, popularity, or status on the Web and site owners have very little control over their own inbound links. (Being off-page factors, inbound links can be influenced only indirectly.) Links with the most rank-boosting power are links from a home page (as opposed to links from pages buried deep within the site), links that are not reciprocal links (you didn't have to link to them in order to get a link back), and links from authority pages in the topical community, meaning pages with their own collection of fabulous inbound links from other websites covering the same topic. The same quality factors hold true for links coming from within your site.

Inbound link anchor text

We mentioned that the way other websites refer to your website provides clues that help search engines understand your content. Anchor text, also called linking text, is the text that is “clickable” on a web page, and it is an important factor in search ranking algorithms. Anchor text that contains your page's targeted keywords can help boost your page's ranks. Combining this keyword-rich anchor text with relevant text surrounding the link can amplify this good effect.

Age of domain

Newer domains have a much tougher time making their way up the ranks than older ones. The exact mechanism behind this may be the search engines measuring the actual length of time that a website has been live, or it may be primarily indirect factors, such as the fact that inbound links tend to accumulate over time. On a positive note for folks with brand-new sites: We've seen plenty of examples of new sites that have performed well in search engines within a couple of months. Take this factor into consideration if you're purchasing a new domain or considering changing an old, established domain name (proceed with caution!). Otherwise, unless you're a spammer or a fly-by-night operation, this is a factor that you don't need to think about a whole lot.

Site authority

Site authority is a blanket term meaning “how important the search engines think your site is.” Many SEOs speculate that individual pages belonging to websites with higher authority will gain higher ranks, even if the individual page does not have high ranking factors. It's as if the search engines are thinking, “This page is from a good family let's give it the benefit of the doubt.” Authority can be general (Wikipedia is an example of a site with general authority), but it's more illustrative to think about authority in terms of a single topic. For example, Sony.com has very high authority on the topic of home electronics, but it has low authority for topics like “paper dolls” or “mountaineering.” Several sitewide factors are combined to measure a domain's overall level of authority on a particular topic. This may include inbound links, age of the domain, and even website traffic. Some believe there's even human intervention from the Google team.

Lesser factors

There are a large number of additional, lesser factors that can influence your ranking. Google, for example, probably includes hundreds and possibly even thousands of factors in its algorithm. Things like keywords in your page URL, image ALT tags, and meta tags all have some degree of influence, as do factors that may be harder for you to control, such as the popularity of a page (as measured by the search engine's own click-through tallies) or how often it is updated. For a comprehensive list of ranking factors, including commentary from several knowledgeable SEO professionals, see this page: www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php.

Meta Keywords: A Waste of Time?

A lot of people have asked the Left Brain and Right Brain for help on their meta keywords tags. Here's why the experts' advice is usually,“Eh, whatever.” The Left Brain says, “Ask Dr. Science.To get a better idea of the value of the meta keywords tag, I performed a very basic experiment: I added a made-up word (‘bistlethwart') to the meta keywords tag of a well-ranked web page. If the tag mattered at all, searching for ‘bistlethwart'would cause this page to appear in search engine results.The verdict? Google, Ask, and Live Search returned no results for the term. But here's a fun surprise:Yahoo! brought up the page as the one and only search result for the term.What can we conclude? Not a whole lot, since the term had no competition whatsoever. But at least this experiment tells us that the meta keywords tag hasn't gone the way of the VHS tape yet.”

The Right Brain says, “Hedge your bets. I think your test is compelling evidence that the meta keywords tag matters… at least a little bit! And there's also plenty of anecdotal examples to add to the mix. Remember the client who ranked for “b-24” (containing a dash), when his visible text only contained “b24” (no dash)? The only instance of the term with the dash was in his meta keywords tag.We've also seen meta keywords tags displayed as listing text in the search engine results. And you never know when ranking algorithms are going to fluctuate again in their favor. That's why this tag deserves at least a few minutes of thought.”

Paid Placement

Every major search engine, as well as plenty of minor search engines and independent websites both large and small, displays paid listings today. Most of these listings are provided by the two major U.S. pay-per-click services, Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), with a small share sourced in Microsoft adCenter.

The market is huge: According to Jupiter Research, online marketers will spend $7 billion on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising by the year 2010. As you learned, pay-per-click (PPC) is generally an auction-based system, with advertisers jockeying for their listings' positions based on bid price. See Figure 4.1 for an example. Until recently, the PPC auction was a fairly straightforward system in which a higher bid resulted in a higher rank. Now, Google and YSM are both gravitating toward a more complex method for determining PPC ranks. In Google AdWords, for example, the PPC algorithm is called a Quality Score, and it awards position based on several factors, including click-through rate, cost, and relevance of the ad text.

So if you were looking to PPC as a way to skirt around the Eternally Hidden Algorithm, we're sorry to say there's one to puzzle over in PPC as well. For starters, noted pay-per-click expert Kevin Lee indicated to us that PPC algorithms today are likely to favor big brands and compelling, relevant ad text because those ads would receive higher predicted click-through rates.

Google AdWords and YSM offer an opt-in feature that will display your listings on partner sites in addition to their own search engines. In this system, called contextual advertising, your listings are matched to the content of the page where they are displayed. See Figure 4.2 for an example. You can manage your contextual campaigns separately from your search-based PPC ads.

There are many variations on the theme of standard pay-per-click ads. You can enhance your ads with shopping cart badges. You can advertise using a cost-per-click, or cost-per-thousand-impressions model. You can experiment with choosing sites for contextual ad placement or let the algorithm decide for you. And you can even try a pay-per-call or pay-per-action model of advertising. In this article, we focus on PPC, because of its omnipresence in the search marketing industry, and because we think it's a reasonable place to jump in.

Competition between PPC services has resulted in some significant advances in campaign tracking, click fraud prevention, and geographic targeting, and these improvements are expected to continue. The bad news is that there are so many products out there even within any given PPC service that the potential for confusion is very high. With more and more site owners adopting PPC, the online help systems are rather robust. But there are lots of people who choose to outsource PPC management because it can be a real headache. It can be done in-house, though, and it doesn't have to be that difficult if you start small and focus on the basics.

PPC is unmatched in the power it gives you over your listing: what it says, who sees it, and when. We also love PPC as a tool for studying the response to your keyword choices.

SEO Trend Spotting

SEO trends move fast, so it's OK to jump in where you are! Use this primer to get clued in to some of the current jargon and trends in SEO. Universal or blended search Remember when the search engines used to deliver three lines of text and a link for every listing? If you wanted vertical search results like video, image, shopping, and maps, you had to click on a tab or perform a special search. Now the major search engines have blended all types of listings together in the standard search results. This may create additional exposure opportunities for your site if it has well-optimized video or image listings. On the flipside, it leaves fewer spots for the standard text listings.

Search engine transparency Don't expect search engines to open the black box and shine a light on their secret algorithms, but all of the major search engines now offer some form of two-way communication between official representatives and the developer crowd. Tips and news are delivered and questions are answered! in blogs and forums, and webmaster tools take the guesswork out of some indexing and listing issues. Those of us who practiced SEO in the Stone Age get a big kick out of seeing the enmity that once existed between the search engines and webmasters begin to dissolve away.

Smarter robot meta tags The trend of search engine transparency has translated into some new tags that you can place on your page to make special requests of the robots that visit your page. Besides controlling whether a page is indexed, website owners can also control whether a snippet is shown, and even whether a page is cached. Visit yourseoplan.com/meta-tags.html for links to how-tos and FAQs.

Widgets Sometimes touted as the future of marketing, widgets are applications that are created with the intention of being reused on other websites. You've probably seen them: News websites allow you to display headlines on your site, and YouTube allows you to embed videos in your blog. There is an endless variety of widgets: Users can create reader polls, display upcoming speaking engagements, or even post AMBER alerts on their site. As a marketer, widgets give you the advantage of putting a little bit of your organization on a lot of different websites. Once site owners have added your widget to their site, your widget could push new content (images, quotes, videos, and more) with no effort at all on the site owner's part. Still not sure what a widget is? Widget directories such as Snipperoo or Widgetbox have a wealth of examples to get your creative juices flowing. Tracking usage and ROI of widgets is a challenge, but thanks to the beta launch of event-tracking features in Google Analytics in late 2007, widget tracking is becoming more sophisticated.

Social search Social search refers to websites that allow users to recommend web pages to each other and influence search results. On social news sites like Digg, stories that receive the most votes win the most visibility and clicks. On social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, people tag sites with keywords so that other people will find them. Social sites offer seemingly limitless opportunities for website promotion and plenty of sites have basked in extreme, server-busting popularity via social search. But this type of promotion isn't easy and the results are unpredictable.

Mobile search Mobile search is like one of those up-and-coming neighborhoods that never quite ups and comes. Web developers are still working out the kinks of building websites in formats that can be viewed on cell phones and handheld devices. Meanwhile, search engines, most notably Google and Yahoo!, are working hard to place themselves in the middle of this growing search sector. The SEO community remains on the sidelines, watching and waiting to see if mobile search will ever fully take off.