How to Rank High in All Search Engines

Search Engine Strategies Conference

Dave Davies speaks of the importance of having the pages content near the top through use of CSS style sheets or manipulating tables the right way. Dave also emphasizes the importance of watching the ratio between the code and content on the page. Again this is done smartly with the use of CSS style sheets. The factors that Dave Davies considers when determining the rankings of web pages are age, content, backlinks, keyword density, and how the pages rank in the other search engines. I have never really took a look at how the pages rank in other search engines into consideration, but can see his point on the subject. With the latest stat results showing that Google took 60% of the search market Dave states that he would rather show up on page 3 of Google than page 1 of MSN. Another opinion of my own is that you should consider your target audience when developing your site for rankings. Which search engine are they likely to choose? Yahoo and Ask Jeeves is usually the shoppers choice, the technical crowd prefer either Google or MSN, and the linux generation is more likely to choose Google over MSN, etc.

Aaron Wall, the author of the book entitled 'SEO Book', talked about the comparisons of the algorithms that the search engine used and explaining the side effects and what sometimes goes wrong with them. For example BigDaddy's infostructure update that caused problems with Google. My opinion on this matter is that you shouldn't be concerned with chasing algorithms, but concentrate on doing what it takes to make your web site more valuable by using backlinks, publicity in the right areas through the use of tags such as furl, DIGG, yahoo, etc. With the popularity of your site going up naturally it is likely that your ranks will be raising on their own. Just keep in the back of your mind the likes and dislikes of search engines to cement this in effect.

Quotes from Aaron Wall on specific search engines:

"Google has been very focused on search, they bias towards information information resources. They are good at determining true link quality. Place more weight on domain level trust (old trusted domains do well). Google has aggressive duplicate content filters. Looks much more at linguistic patterns than the other engines and filters out some hyper focused pages."

"MSN is new to the game, relative. Link graph was heavily spammed by the time they got in; they like new sites, bursty links. They focus a lot more on on-page factors, and the algorithm is very literal."

"Yahoo has been focused on being pretty literal, meaning if you search for "dog fight cats" it would look for that phrase specifically. They have changed last week to be more like Google. He still sees link exchanges and some blog spam doing well in Yahoo. Yahoo may be slightly more commercial bias then others."

Most of the speakers spoke of the importance of checking your web stats through the use of web site analytics to find out what is working and what is not so that you can improve your web site. I have previously written a search engine optimization article on the subject that you can read. This article will give you a good insight on what to look for so that you can improve your web site.

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