SEO Page Weight

Page weight is the weight a search engine gives your web page it is based on a complex algorithm that is always changing. Search engines constantly change and keep the algorithm secret so that people cannot just figure it out and cheat the system.

Webmasters learn the parts of the algorithm formulas by looking at the top ranking sites and seeing what attributes they have in common. They also can tell parts of the formula by looking at the rankings and making small changes to web sites and watching how that affects the ranking the next time the site is indexed.

Key words in the body of a page should be around 1%-3%. This means that in a 500 word article, the key words should come up around 5 to 15 times. More than that and the search engines may start to penalize your page. Less than that and the search engines may not realize what your page is about. There are many myths about how it will help you rank better if you fill your pages full of as many keywords as you can. This is not true. It reads poorly, sounds unnatural, and the search engines are not that dumb. They can tell what is an unusually high amount of keywords and they will label it as “key word stuffing” and penalize your page.

Links and titles have more weight than the average text in the body of a page, so we want keywords to be in good places where they can weigh and let the search engines know what the subject of the page is. All of the titles and headings should be key words that are relevant to the subject in the pages.

Links will also give your website and web pages weight. There are 2 basic types of links that are very helpful in SEO . . . internal site links and external back links.
Internal links are links that go to pages within your site. If you have a 40-page site, you will have 40 internal links. If 30 of those pages have the word “dog” in the links, a search engine will read that as you have 30 pages on the subject of dogs, and it will probably give your site more weight in the key word “dog” than a site with 5 pages on about dogs.

External back links are links outside your site that point to your site. These show that your site is important enough to have listings and links pointing back to it. Some back links, like directories and listings, can be worth very little if they are from low quality directories that no one uses. Some can be very valuable. For example, a link used as a source on the Dog page of Wikipedia will show a search engine that your website is a leading reference on dogs. If you have good information people will start putting links on forums and discussion boards pointing back to information on your site. This is also very valuable as this shows that people value your information and are using it as a point of reference in discussions and studies.

Websites also need to be laid out well so they are “SEO friendly”. This means that the information needs to be in a nice, readable format for the search engine to index and display.

Sometimes you can find great websites and webpages several pages back in the search engine result while junky little garbage sites are all over the first pages. This is a good example of a site not having a good SEO layout. It is a good site and has quality information, but the way it is set up and coded, the search engines cannot read and index where it belongs.

Search engines tell us the basics of what they are looking for when they rank and index pages for their searches. They want quality content and they want the leading authorities on the front pages.

At PixelPly, we follow the search engine guidelines and help our clients make web pages full of quality information and lay it out so it will weigh and be read easily and smoothly by the search engine robots that index pages. This way your site will have lasting results and rankings.