Be an SEO Spy

There are a few undercover methods to researching just what makes a high ranking webpage that you can use in order to improve the setup of your own pages. Besides just looking at the website of a successful competitor, you can also take a peak at what lies underneath that high ranked page by investigating the source code on their pages.

In the dropdown menu of your web browser there is a tab labeled “view”. You will want to check the box “view source”. This will show you the actual html code of the page in question. There are several places to check for how they placed their information for best results. Look at how they set up their meta tags and meta keywords. Make a list of the ones they used and compare them to how they would relate to your site.

Then look at where these keywords are used in the headers on the page. You should find the primary keywords near the top and the bottom of the page. Different search engines will read a page in varying ways and this will help prove that your entire page is relevant to the topic. If no keyword is found in a large part of the page, the computing algorithms will consider that the point was lost somewhere in the text.

The alt tags of the pictures placed on the page are another good place to drop an appropriate keyword or two. Many people forget that the alt tag is very important to search engine spiders. They cannot see the picture so they rely on a description to know if it is relevant to the page topics. With no alt tag, they will consider the picture a null spot in the page. Then check to see the overall placement, or weight, of the keywords throughout the text on the page. Optimally this should be between one and a half to three percent of the overall text. Do not overuse your keywords. BY the tim you reach a five percent saturation, the search engines will begin to consider that you are “spamming” the keyword and will actually devalue your page for it. It is a fine but very important distinction to maintain.

With the increased use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for design, you will not be as likely to see just how they achieved the look of the page, but that is not necessary. You do not want to look like a clone anyway. But by evaluating the source code of a number of successful high ranking pages you will get a better idea of what it takes to gain the search engine’s approval. You will also have gathered a list of effective keywords in your niche that can be used as a starting point for your own keyword evaluation.

You can use this data to construct your own pages with the happy knowledge that you will be able to move more swiftly up the ranks toward that coveted first page placement in the search engine results pages and ultimate business success.

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