Are Keywords Really Higher Valued When On Top Of Page?

[Faceless Guy 0]

I often come across websites where it is told that keywords have a high search engine value when they're on top of the page. Can somebody confirm this? I'm just asking, because I think it's strange that a search engine can understand the structure of a webpage (in terms of layout of page elements) enough to know what parts are important.

[gisellebebegirl 0]

i dont think so, i just put them on top of the page to get things out of the way, and so people know what the site is about, not much because of the search engine...search engines work more on how many people link to your site etc, visitors

[anwiii 17]

yes! it is VERY important to put your keywords where they will be most prominent. normally, you will use your h1 or h2 headers, and then some text explaining what your site is about on top of the page. this is VERY important. also, when able to, using bold text helps too. using keywords that is in your description tags or title tag is important.it use to be that spiders wouldn't crawl your whole page. they also wouldn't index all your links. search engines have different algorithms. google, has one of the most unique ones to this day and is the most popular search engine. even if they don't hold your keywords on top of the page as more important than the bottom of the page, it's still important to list your keywords on top because that's where your h1 or h2 headers are most likely to be found. what is MORE important than keywords on top though is keyword density. you don't want google to think you are spamming.....so DONT.....especially on the top of your page because even your visitors would be turned off.what google looks for most is your relevant back links. back links that are relevant to your own web page that also has a higher pr than your web page. since google is looking more towards relevancy, then google is also looking at the content on your web page which keywords at the top will only help.if you have a blog, where you only list the top ten posts and then they get deleted from your main page, it's always important to keep your keywords on your main page if your main page is that important to you. normally, your blog posts will get seen more than your main page index so you REALLY need to make sure your keywords are in your blog posts. if you can do that, then your keywords will always be on top of your main page blog.....which means you will always have the content related to your backlinks.

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hello!One of the many problems with trying to determine how a search engine works is that you never really know what happens under the hood. Except for the employees of Google, who sign non-disclosure agreements for all of what goes on within Google, no body really knows how Google works and cannot tell you more than something vague about how search engines work, in general.There are web masters and SEO experts who have observed a pattern among web sites that appear at the top of the search results, and they attempt to try these on their own web sites to see a difference.A search engine, like any other software, rarely remains the same as the engineers building it keep tweaking the various parameters that control the ranking of the website. This can include something like the size of the keywords on the page, the position of the keywords, or even the form in which the keywords appear. However, the most important factor in the ranking of web pages is the existence of back links. If you have a few hundred hyperlinks from other websites that link to your website, you would have a higher ranking in search engines. However, this does not mean that you can expect to get a higher rank by posting a hyperlink to your website on Internet forums and blog comments because they are treated as possible spam links and are therefore ignored by the search engines. The link juice could come from genuine bloggers or web masters who link to something specific on your website because they want to direct users your way - this can either happen as a result of them linking something on your site, or as a mutually agreed upon condition so you can get emailing all of your buddies who can do you a favor by posting a link to you on their websites in exchange for a link back to them.From a repeat-reader's perspective, however, search engine optimization makes no difference as he or she would be visiting your site regularly anyway to catch up with the latest occurences and happenings, so the content would matter more than the search engine's ranking of the website, so content really is the most important part of the website. Xisto has a pretty strong focus on content and there's really no disputing to that - if we didn't have content and if we didn't have so many different members posting to the forum, we wouldn't be getting all of the Google organic search traffic.Finally, you might have seen the number of changes that we all observe of GMail, Google Buzz, Orkut, and all of the other Google websites over the period of one month so you can imagine the number of changes that are made to Google but take effect under the sheets so we don't really know that there has been a change, although the search engine has been tweaked to provide better search results and to keep Google ahead of the pack. Rules of search engine optimization keep changing, and as algorithms grow more advanced and complex, they are better able to index data that was not previously possible, such as the ability to index content withing Adobe PDF documents, Postscript documents, Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and Microsoft Powerpoint presentation slides.

[mahesh2k 0]

I often come across websites where it is told that keywords have a high search engine value when they're on top of the page. Can somebody confirm this?

Yes that is with most of the search engines unless that search engine is meta search engine. Besides Search engines do weight H1/H2/H3 tags. You can read more about it here. Other than that bold and italics for keywords can work as well but just don't overdo that.

search engines work more on how many people link to your site etc, visitors

That was game of yesterday, today it is not as powerful as it is used to be, you can still weigh higher if you've less links. It's just that google is trying to figure out how to sort out the content and how people read on web. copied content, excessive backlinks, irrelevant backlinks and machine traffic is easily sorted by google. they're clever at what they do, just they're not consistent with it.

[anwiii 17]

a link is a link is a link. you will never get punished for too many links. although the relevant links are important to google, google is only 1 search engine. also, just because a link isn't google friendly doesn't mean traffic cannot be created through that link. so backlinks are more important than what you are stating. since google wont punish you for a back link, even if it was from an ffa spam site, google will not punish you for that link. if they did, then it would be way to easy to advertise your competitions site on bad links.although google is incorporating youtube now and social network sites(although i heard profile site are becoming less relevant now), the basics still are important which is content. yes, the bold and italics along with the headers still create relevancy within your own site and i also feel having the keywords more on top of the page is more important while still keeping your keyword density in check. content and backlinks are more important though. the more pages you have, the better. the more links you have to those pages, the better. some say one way backlinks are the only way to go, thus saying link exchanges don't work. i would have to disagree with that because if two sites are relevant to eachother and only one site is getting the back links, it leaves a lot of relevant site out in the cold. but times IS slowly changing when considering social network site and google's algorithms including not just site stats but individual users who would post a link on their personal profile or a tweet for instance....people who don't have a website with multiple pages.....just a profile with their status messages.

[mahesh2k 0]

People create more than 100 or more backlinks and still are not getting sufficient results from google. Gaming google on backlinks was easy during 2007-2009 . but last algorithm update slapped badly to link marketers. So creating too many backlinks are not at all going to benefit. Link from higher PR site without spamming will be counted irrespective of dofollow or nofollow tag. Nofollow-tag's view was not very much clear by matt cutts but it's obvious that he'll not reveal much on videos or blog. relevant links and avoiding linking to spam site or spam link farms is way to get better results. Competitors black hat technique can be avoided as google understands them but we have control on what we link from our site so if we link to any spam or linkfarms then sure google will punish for sure. So too many links from site are under observation from google to check and are regularly placed inside sandbox. Create new blog and have lots of outgoing link, and you'll have sandbox from google. traffic with or without google is different issue. backlinks from any site is not going to help, higher the PR in this case helps more than backlinks from PR0 site. any backlink is not going to help in 2010. this is the reason many linkexchange membership sites are at price 147$ or so (for example 1waylinks, which filters blog with content in order to give 1 way link of higher PR 7 and Above). Google is more strong noticing black hat techniques of taking competitor down so there is no punishment there. But point is any random backlink is not counted, these easy-backlinks-dropping days are no more with google. Social networks are adding nofollow tag, for example digg and reddit on their mainpage. so we're not benefiting from that. But for traffic social networks are worthy. Profile links even though dofollow will less be considered by google, little experiment with angela's backlink builder program which features more than 20 social media profiles can show that since December it's not working well with social media profile backlinks. Forum profiles or thread backlinks are much better than social media profiles as those are still weighted. Also one thing to note here is many social netork profiles are adding URL shortner to the links posted on their network (for example, say twitter nofollow+urlshortner) this totally leaves chances of indexing even a name or url of site. Link-exchanges are not going to die but higher PR linking is weighed more now and we can easily experiment with low PR and google's response and see the result. Try searching for "terry kyle's 60 days experiment", this shows how search engines(google and others) respond to high PR and High traffic site's linking.

[k_nitin_r 8]

Hi!@mahesh2k (also see next note below)An SEO consultant mentions that page titles, heading tags, and URLs are the quickest way to make your website more favorable to Google. I agree with the usage of the H1/H2/H3 heading tags too - it's the best chance that the web page has to tell Google about its relevance, apart from having a hyperlink from another website.@anwiiYes, "a link is a link is a link", but a single hyperlink pointing to your website from a high page rank website would count for much much more than a multiple hyperlinks pointing to your website from a low page rank website, or even one without a pagerank. Google doesn't penalize websites for the presence of a link on a website that posts nothing more than spam but that doesn't count for anything either. Relevancy, as you've suggested, is something that Google's engineer spend a lot of effort on to determine what the context of a hyperlink to your website indicates. If your website links to a spam site, you might be penalized, though incoming links don't affect you negatively. A couple of web masters have mentioned about their discovery of spam links that were inserted onto their pages by means of a hack by the drop in their page rank or by finding their web pages de-listed from Google.@mahesh2kNofollow was supposed to be a pretty big blow to link spammers, but apparently that hasn't stopped them from trying. They continue to roll out spam bots that can spam lots of different kinds of blog engines and they're getting smart enough to extract a captcha to have the captcha challenge answered by a human while the bot continues its job of tossing out spam. Data entry staff in third world countries often spend their entire day using a data entry form with a captcha image on one side of the screen and a text box on the other side, with a button to submit the response to the captcha challenge.As you've mentioned, URL shorteners make it difficult for search engines to determine that the web page indicated in the URL is the same as your actual URL but the search engines just might get smart enough to send a request to the short URL provider to determine the actual URL as computing power and bandwidth becomes cheaper and easier to get.

[mahesh2k 0]

@k_nitin_r: I've to agree with you on that data entry for captcha cracking stuff. Sites like pixprofit and some russian sites are into this business giving asians these jobs.

 

but the search engines just might get smart enough to send a request to the short URL provider to determine the actual URL as computing power and bandwidth becomes cheaper and easier to get.

I asked about this to some of the professionals in searchenginewatch site. their view is that why google should take notice of what is inside the URL shortner ? Besides other than crawling, their time for finding out what URL is behind the shortner is totally wasted so there is not a slight chance of those short URL's taking into consideration. Analytics is another part and weighing them is another. Do you know there are some URL shortner business running around ? like adf.ly, ad.ly , linkbee etc. If google or any search engines starts to notice the links behind the shortner and starts to weigh them then those shortner service will be in boom for SEO. So it's quite easy to see that linkjuice is diluted while using URL shortner. URL shortners are ignored by SE's.