Hello Everyone and thanks fo ryour help in advance. I am developing a website and want to optimize it for the search engines, however, I am very new and inexperienced. I have searched under two Google searches that I would like to appear in:
“Naples FL Pediatricians”
“Pediatricians in Naples FL”
However, I am confused on a couple of issues. First, the searches return relatively different lists of sites. More importantly, none of the sites that are returned highly ranked have either of these terms used on the site and certainly are not used much if they are. Would someone give me some general ideas of why this happens and where to begin? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
That’s strange, because when I search for those phrases I do get sites that are (or appear to be) relevant.
Google uses a huge range of factors when ranking sites, over 200 at the last count. Part of it is to do with what words appear on the page, partly where they appear on the page. Partly it comes down to the number of inbound links from other sites, the quality of those sites, the context of each of those links (eg link text and surrounding text). And don’t forget that Google has a honking big thesaurus and can look at similar/related words rather than the exact words you’ve searched for.
There’s masses of information in the FAQ and other ‘sticky’ threads at the top of the forum - I’d suggest having a read through those first, and then if you’ve got any specific questions about a particular search or site then you can come back and ask them then.
Thanks for the response. The results from the two searches are relevant, but different, which is what confuses me. Also, the pages do not use the words Pediatrician in Naples FL, so I’m trying to figure out how these gained relevancy. Obviously, I need to figure out a strategy to climb in the rankings.
Word order does matter to a certain extent. Google can interpret the request slightly differently if you change the order of the words. The results I’m getting are that it’s pretty much the same sites for both phrases, but some of them are in a different order depending on how you phrase the query. That’s just one of those things. No, a site doesn’t need to use the exact phrase that someone has searched for, as long as it uses the words there or related words. So a site might use “pediatrics” instead of “pediatrician”, or might spell out Florida in full rather than using “FL”. Google is smart, and it can usually have a pretty good go at interpreting text rather than simply looking for an exact word match.
Thanks again for the response. So where do I start. I have a small site up at www.kidsmedicalcare.com. However, I’m not sure what the next step is to get the site to rank in these searches.