Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

With no website submittal process and little market share as of now, Ask

receives little attention from the SEO industry, and rightfully so. However, we like its

prospects for the future. Its business strategy seems to be floating in limbo, but the

SEO world agrees that the search results are excellent, and that certainly bodes well.

Now that you’ve got a handle on the top search engines, we’ll discuss the ele-

ments that influence their rankings.

Organic Ranking Factors

You already know that search engines use complicated secret formulas, called ranking

algorithms, to determine the order of their results. You even know from Chapter 3,

“Eternal Truths of SEO,” 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: 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, chasing morphing search engines, and possessing varying lev-

els of interest and talent in the writing and technical components of SEO. SEO experts

are a diverse group, ranging from the fanatical to the rabidly fanatical, and there are

radically differing opinions within the SEO community about what works and what’s

important. 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

• 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:

c04. 8:07 67