What are you looking for? Each search engine uses confidential and proprietary algorithms to rank sites, but a few common denominators seem to matter in most cases:

•  Page Name: The actual name of the page; for instance <banking.html> should help with searches for banking.
•  Page Title: The words that appear in the blue Title area of the browser window.
•  Page Text: Frequency of certain words and how close to the top of the page these words appear.
•  META Tags: Keywords, site or page descriptions, and other information useful for search engine robots. META tags are located in the HEAD section of the page and can only be seen by viewing the HTML source code.

Infoseek results from “California” & “bank” search.

To see this in action let’s perform a search and study our results. Go to Infoseek www.infoseek.com and search on California bank. As you can see in the screenshot above, there are 1,977,853 pages with one or both of these keywords. And, drum roll please, the site that rises to the top of the 2 million pile is The California Bank Reference Guide www.findley-reports.com/fr2b.html Also, note the Wells Fargo banner running above the results. Wells is sponsoring the word “bank” on Infoseek.

Looking at The California Bank Reference Guide Web site, we see three methods it’s employed to increase its ranking:

1. The page title is “California Bank Reference Guide.”

The number one “California bank” site on Infoseek.

2. The first two words that appear in the text of this page are California bank.

3. Select View Source in your browser and you will see the META tags near the top of the source code. Notice the words bank and California are listed in the Keywords. Also notice that the site hasn’t attempted to “spam” the search engines with too many occurrences of the word bank or California. The search engines fight keyword spam by ignoring it, or worse dropping the site to the back of the pack.

My discussion here only scratches the surface of this ever-evolving topic. If you wish to learn more check out these sites:

Alan Martin is Webmaster for Online Banking Report and President of NetBranch, a bank Web site consulting and design company based in Atlanta, GA. Prior to founding NetBranch, Mr. Martin was Webmaster at Security First Network Bank. Contact him at alan@netbranch.com  or (770)736-5956.