In early February 2006 Google had a PageRank update and http://www.mnsi.net/~ljones/ went from PR2 to PR4, which I was not expecting. MNSi, the hosting/ISP company is now PR5, an increment of one.
SEO Search Engine Optimizing is the art of getting targeted webpages to appear higher in the search engine's reports than other pages when searching for certain words or phrases. It is not possible to guarantee that this will happen for popular terms and companies the make the claim that they can do this are highly suspect, if not criminal. The number of web pages on the Internet is increasing at 30% per year. There are now over 9 billion pages in English. Below are some of the terms I interested in.
| Occurrences in SERPs | ||
| key words | One or both words | Phrase |
| Leonard Jones | 10,000,000 | 5,000 |
| hod carrier | 100,000 | 28,000 |
| JR Miller | 9,000,000 | 150,000 |
| restaurants | 166,000,000 | |
| Windsor restaurants | 2,370,000 | 15,500 |
| Windsor restaurants Ontario | 1,590,000 | 13 |
| Ontario restaurants | 23,600,000 | 223,000 |
| London restaurants Ontario | 2,630,000 | 61 |
And the reason I am interested these keywords are the following site Leonard Jones, JR Miller, Windsor Restaurants, Ontario Restaurants and London Restaurants. My interest in hod carriers has waned over the months.
SEO techniques are changing. PageRank used to be very important. The original algorithm used to be complex but understandable. The latest algorithm is a closely guarded secret and there is some debate as to how much PageRank influences placement in SERPs.
Optimal use of keywords in a page is important. They should be in the URL, the title, and in headers, They should also be bolded, possibly italicized and near the top of the document. The density is important, but what that density should be is an enigma. Incoming links with anchor text are definitely the most critical element in achieving high placement in SERPs. Where the links originate also is vital. Government and university pages are preferred by Google.
Page added 2006. February.