Search Engine Positioning

Over the past week or so, one or two customers have noticed a change in the positioning of their site’s within results for particular key phrases on Yahoo!

This behavioural change would normally suggest that the search engine in question is implementing a change to its algorithm for delivering search results.

Algorithms are a complex set of rules designed to deliver results to the search engine user, based on the search phrases entered.

All of the major Search Engines regularly make changes to their respective algorithms, to achieve the goal of returning the most relevant content to their users.

These changes can be beneficial to certain sites, and detrimental to others. But as changes happen regularly, whilst one change may have been detrimental to your rankings, then the next change may be turn out to be beneficial, so there can be a lot of fluctuation in your site positioning.

As search engines increasingly strive to deliver more relevant content than that of their rivals, there are a few things that you can do to make sure that you get the best rankings within results.

In Short:

Make sure all content is relevant.

Never over-use keywords unnecessarily; this can be viewed as Spam.

Check that your HTML code is valid, according to W3C coding guidelines.

Mike Irving
ASP Web Developer