SEO Tips - Optimize the URL, Title, & Topic to Improve Page Ranking

What Exactly is a URL and How Does It Sway Your Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP) on Google, PageRank, Yahoo, Bing, Alexa Rank, and HubPages?

Your URL should be the first thing you optimize when you are trying to improve your search engine ranking on Google, PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo, Bing, or HubPages. However, you can't really understand how a URL has a say in the calculations of your page ranking so that you may optimize it, until you understand what a URL actually is. If you are not sure what a URL is, don’t worry. It is pretty easy to understand what it actually is once you get past the technical jargon definition of it being a global address to where your particular article is located on the server. To put it simply, think of a filing cabinet with all its folders labeled according to what is inside them. The label on the folder is the address for the content the folder holds, which is just what a URL is. It is an address, yet it is also a label telling the world what is at the address.

So how can an address have a say in your page rank? Well it all has to do with relevance, how the address relates to the topic. When your address relates to your topic, your readers will know what to expect and remember the address to get there because of the relation to the topic. The same goes for the search engine web crawlers. When the web crawler is indexing your site; they index it according to the topic it relates to most using the address you gave it, as it is programmed to accept that the address contains what the address says. Therefore when you are deciding on your URL, make sure you are describing your topic and to really optimize it, make sure to add in a few of those keywords related to your topic.

Your Topic’s Relation to Your Ranking on Google, PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo, Bing, and HubPages

How you optimize your topic could add quite a bit of weight to your ranking even though the search engines really only consider a couple different aspects about your topic to determine your page ranking on the search engine results. I pretty much told you one aspect about topics that search engines base your page rank on; do you know what it is? Where your site is indexed is based on what your topic is about. If your topic is about Andes chocolate mints, and you want to be indexed on the search engines under “chocolate”, “chocolate mint”, or maybe even “best chocolate mint”, then you need to make sure you describe with plenty of detail, using keyword search terms in your first paragraph, as well as all throughout the content that is describing everything about the Andes chocolate mint, so that the search engine can practically taste that Andes chocolate mint. When you describe the topic so well that there is no question on the topic you are talking about, there will be a less likely chance your site will end up in the dreaded Internet black hole, where it’s only brought up by search terms that are rarely ever used by people searching for the topic your content is based on.

Search engine web crawlers are not just looking at how much the content of your topic relates to the topic you are trying to be indexed under, they also look at how many other sites are currently indexed under the same topic. Depending how popular the topic is on the search engine, you could have some serious proving as to how relative and new your content is to the topic as well as some extensive white hat SEO (organic search engine optimization) to do, if you want a chance at a good page ranking for that popular topic.

Do You Know how Traffic to Your Article Affects Your Search Engine Ranking on Google, PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo, Bing, and Hub Score?

If you are seasoned at writing online content then you may already know how the search engine web crawlers use the amount of traffic received to help calculate your page ranking. For those who are new to writing and publishing online, here is a quick explanation on how it affects your page rank and hub score. It’s pretty simple really, the more clicks your article link receives on the search engine, HubPages, or any other article based community you may be publishing on, the better the page rank, and in the case of HubPages, the better the hub score you will have. This is because of those special page ranking algorithms that search engines like Google, PageRank, Bing, Yahoo, Alexa Rank, and article based communities like HubPages, EzineArticles, or Articlesbase use. These algorithms log both, recurring and unique views (clicks) on your article link then compares it to the amount of unique and recurring views received on other site links per a given day, which then affects your page ranking on the search engine results or on article based communities, and how high your hub score is.

How Can Your Title Influence Your Google, PageRank, Alexa Rank, Bing, Etc. Search Engine Ranking and HubPages Hub Score?

The words you use in your title make a difference not only to whether your article gets viewed, but also to how search engines rank it. You could have a really catchy title, yet it is nowhere to be found in the search engine results because you did not use the right words (keywords). If your title doesn’t contain any keywords related to the topic of your content, the search engines could consider your content to not be as relevant to the topic, giving your site a poor page ranking.

It’s not just the words that the web crawler is looking at in your title, it is also the length. Now I’m not for sure on this one, however, I think it is because search engines have to index infamous amounts of sites. Therefore many search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask, Bing, etc., tend to cut titles off after 60 characters, spaces and all. If you must have a title longer than 60 characters, make sure your keywords are before that 60 character cut-off.

Being as the views you get on your article have an impact on that page rank as well, you want to make sure that you have a really catchy, attention grabbing title. Your title is your call out to your reader, saying “Hey look at me, I’m interesting, catchy, funny, or I know what you want to know about this topic, so check me out!” Your title should inform your readers of what they want and what you can extend to them, all while making it search engine friendly with your keywords and trying to keep it short.

Copyright © 1/13/2012 by A.K. Love (dragnhaze)

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