Comments on: This bottle of Steven’s awakens ancient feelings

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:14:53 +0000

And on the topic of SEO, it looks like Ryan is doing pretty well also: http://www.google.com/search?q=ryan+gariepy

By: Mike Purvis

Mike Purvis — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:58:22 +0000

The reason for the difference is that you’ve included “UW” in the query, which barely shows up on our page. I could fix it, but I’m too lazy at the moment.

(If you view-source http://newtron.uwmike.com, you see “Mechatronics 2009″ everywhere, but “UW Mechatronics” almost nowhere. Ideally, we should google-bomb just “Mechatronics”, but there may be some tough competition.)

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 19:16:28 +0000

You have to give the guy a little bit of credit though. He did take initiative and is very enthusiastic, better than most people in our class. He at least has some class spirit and pride! Heh…Me, Christine and You (Ryan) all emailed him though over it

By: Ryan Gariepy

Ryan Gariepy — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 19:05:35 +0000

Ah, Nics2010…waste of $10 there.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 16:44:44 +0000

Yeah, I agree Tye. I tried to get that across in the post. There was one of the links I had where it listed about 100 of the SEO factors that google considers and The name of the keyword in the link and the ALT attribute are on it.

By: Tye

Tye — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 09:17:56 +0000

An important factor in the relevance of search results is the words that are used to link to the sites. For example, if you search for ‘tye’ on Google, my website (Tye Shavik’s website) with a page rank of 5 is listed before Michael Tye’s website with a pagerank of 6. Even though Michael Tye’s website has a higher pagerank than mine, Google considers my page more relevant to the query because my website is more frequently linked to using the word ‘tye’. When you’re having a link placed on another site you should consider the text that is being used because it will affect your pages relevance for certain search queries.

Having links placed on another website might increase your pagerank but won’t necessarily move the site up in the search results. By putting keywords in the link text Google will consider the linked site more relevant when those keywords are used in a search.

For image links, the text in the ALT attribute of the image is used as the text for the link. Many people don’t put anything in the ALT attribute when placing image links and lose relevance in search engines for that.