Most search engines rank the relevance of your site by using the following keyword factors:
Prominence How high in your HTML and DOM hierarchy your top keywords appear (title, h1, etc.).
[Excerpt shortened — full text in the source: Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization by Andrew B. King.]
By implementing these recommendations, you will create web sites that are easier to index and the crawlers, robots and spiders will find the information faster resulting in listing that ranks higher on search engines.
Closer to home
At RCS we take great pride in the fact that we develop with standars, our interest and passion for CSS, RSS and blogs have helped us achive better results.
The table below demonstrates the amount of time a web site has been visited by a SEs in November.
13 different robots* — Hits, Bandwidth, Last visit
- MSNBot — 1334+164 — 14.47 MB — 30 Nov 2004 - 01:53
- Googlebot — 1109+43 — 10.84 MB — 29 Nov 2004 - 14:07
- Alexa (IA Archiver) — 209+81 — 2.20 MB — 29 Nov 2004 - 04:24
- Inktomi Slurp — 125+113 — 1.45 MB — 30 Nov 2004 - 01:24
- Unknown robot (identified by 'crawl') — 126+12 — 134.13 KB — 29 Nov 2004 - 00:51
- AskJeeves — 108+25 — 1.22 MB — 29 Nov 2004 - 06:38
- Unknown robot (identified by hit on 'robots.txt') — 0+42 — 172.31 KB — 29 Nov 2004 - 00:25
- BaiDuSpider — 23+2 — 195.24 KB — 26 Nov 2004 - 17:54
- GigaBot — 4+11 — 85.17 KB — 22 Nov 2004 - 18:01
- Walhello appie — 4+4 — 44.42 KB — 18 Nov 2004 - 21:30
- Others — 5+2 — 49.72 KB
Both Mark and I can attest to the fact that the traffic on our website www.raincitystudios.com has increased by 5 times (unique visitors) in November compared to October.
Not only we increased the amount of visitors, but we also see an increased in the amount of pages viewed per visit.
Now, I know what you smart cats out there will say, "Yeah, but you're cheating; you have a blog attached to your site, that helps with traffic!" and that's exactly the point I am getting at!
Search Engines love blogs
Blogs in our opinions are one of the best thing going on the web for indexing and "search-ability". The majority of the "geeks" we meet all agrees. Blogs are easy to index because of the RSS feed, they are meant to be read, they want to be read...
Google, Askjevees, MSN, Yahoo, some of the hardest SE to get listed on will become daily crawlers to your site(s), indexing every pages (Now, that's assuming that you did your homework and developed with standards)...
Last, keep in mind that one of the largest blog service around: Blogger.com is free to use and owned by Google. As far as I am concern, it's a foot in the door to get indexed.
Information source for the first section: Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization by Andrew B. King.
*Check our review of Andrew's book, coming on December 8, 2004.