Relevancy: The Most Important Search Optimization Factor

And once you have decided to focus your attention on these search engines, the single most important factor to consider is relevancy. Search engines still make their most of their money from advertisers (and their ads). To make money they need to show their ads to as many people as possible. And the basic fact is that visitors choose to use a particular search engine because of the “relevancy” of the results they get. Think about it.

Then the critical job becomes making your pages more relevant to the major search engines. To do this you need to consider both “on-page” and “off-page” factors. The most important on-page factors are all related to keywords and the placement of keywords throughout your page. Other on-page factors include things like title tags, description tags, and anchor text (link text). But these also include things like bold or italicized text, text in HTML links, and alt tags for images. The most important off-page factors are related to inbound links (the anchor text, the text in paragraph surrounding the anchor text, and even the titles of pages linking to your pages. There are many more.  Systematically addressing these factors and carefully assessing the impact of your changes lies at the heart of any effective search engine optimzation effort.

Many people have asked me about the need to “submit” their websites to popular search engines. At one time there were plenty of services available promoting these kinds of services. But I can’t remember the last time I recommended this course of action for anyone. The reason for this is simple. Google is the single most important entry in the search engine market and Google clearly prefers to “discover” sites from the external links in other websites. Google clearly states this preference on their AddURL page. Submitting a site is clearly NOT necessary.