The Art of Making Your Pages "Relevant"

	The Art of Making Pages "Relevant"
Alma Mater Software, Inc.

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Making Pages "Relevant"

When you do a search at one of the major Internet search engine sites, you usually match thousands of pages. In an attempt to show the "best" ones at the top, the search engine's software will compute what is known as a "relevance score" for each document. The documents are then shown, highest score first. This method is know as "relevance ranking."

As a site developer, you can help to make your pages be more "relevant" to your target audience. Here are two tips:

Mention details. Be as detailed as possible when describing what you want your page to convey. These details will get "hit" when the user searches.
Example: If your site promotes your Web consultancy, and you are based in New York, but also practice in New Jersey, make sure you have a page that mentions both "New York" and "New Jersey." This will put you nearer the top of the results of a search like "web consultant new jersey" than if you had not mentioned your geographical area of service.
Use synonyms. Try using different words for the same things on your pages, this will cause you to get "hit" on different searches.
Example: On a site that promotes auto racing, you should refer to "car racing" as well as "auto racing" so that your pages will show up in searches on "car racing." Some search engines maintain a thesaurus which tries to capture these similarities automatically, but most are not that smart. You can also put synonyms in the "keywords" <META> tag.

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The Art of Making Pages "Relevant"

Alma Mater Software, Inc.

Making Pages "Relevant"