Website Relevance: What the Search Engines Are Really Ranking On

A lot is heard about enhancing your site for search engines - getting you as high as possible in these information monsters! And, you should build your site for these behemoths of the information age - so that they process you as high up the food chain as possible. But, don't forget what these monsters are really trying to do - serve your customer. They are trying to find the most "relevant" (an important word to remember) sites for the keyword your potential customer is trying to find information on. So, what you have on your page should be as targeted for those keywords as possible. But, remember, if you focus on providing your potential customers information about your company and your products, you will have a relevant site. And the search engines will very much appreciate this. So, keep your pages targeted on your product and keywords you have identified people will use to find you and your product. Include your company name in your writeups, say your product name over and over in your content and other key parts of your site and include the keywords for your product in your content, over and over, of course.

How many times a word should be repeated in the title, head, content, links, etc. of a site is anybody's guess. And there are those out there that will have you believe they can "almost' tell you what that should be. But, one thing I've learned, the search engines are fickle - what works this week, may not work next week in getting your site up in the rankings. What does work consistently, is keeping "relevant" information about your product and services on your webpages and in every part of your website day in and day out.

So, what is relevance? Wikipedia defines relevance as " a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable some information is to a given matter." This definition should become your measuring stick on anything you put into your web page - how pertinent, connected, or applicable is it to your subject or keyword? In other words, for every title, sentence, phrase, header, link, filename, graphic name, video name, dataelement name, you put into your web page, make sure it is somehow relevant to your subject.

One of the largest search engines, Google, gave us a hint about relevance's importance in it's technology in a recent spoof on April Fool's Day. It couldn't help itself when it wrote this dissertation on it's patented Pigeon Cluster Ranking Technology. The word relevancy is mentioned several times in this treatise of this amazing technology. (Actually, it makes about as much sense as any other explanation of search engine technology on the web - try the wikipedia page-rank explanation!)

Relevancy should be the foundation for all your webpages. Every element should somehow be connected back to this bedrock that you are building your page on - relevance. Does this header provide information about this subject? Is this lengthy paragraph filled with information about what this web page is about, or is it wandering off topic? Is this filename, picture1.jpg relevant? Or is the filename irrelevant? If it is an irrelevant filename, then it is worthless in the search engines eyes.

Search engines are constantly striving to provide the most relevant results for searches performed on their sites. They are in a constant battle with clever website builders who keep trying to get their irrelevant pages ranked higher and higher over relevant pages. If your site is delivered to them with relevancy built in the site through and through, then your chances of getting a favorable ranking is very high. Their goal is to deliver relevant results to people who are seriously trying to find information about a subject on the web. You can help them do this by providing as targeted a web page as possible about your subject matter - a page that is pertinent, connected, and applicable.