search tool and the keyphrase analysis tools from vendors such as Overture (www.over-
ture.com) listed at the end of the chapter. When completing keyphrase analysis we need
to understand different qualifiers that users type in. For example, this list of seven differ-
ent types of keyphrases with different qualifiers is taken from an Overture representative
talking at Search Engine Strategies in 2004. We have added examples for ‘car insurance’:

1 Comparison/quality – compare car insurance
2 Adjective (price/product qualifiers) – cheap car insurance, woman car insurance
3 Intended use – high mileage car insurance
4 Product type – holiday car insurance
5 Vendor – churchill car insurance
6 Location – car insurance UK
7 Action request – buy car insurance.

You can see some of these types of keyphrases by using the Overture keyterm sugges-
tion tool. For example for a single month in the UK, the most popular phrases related to
car insurance were:

1 Car insurance, 1,423,350
2 Cheap car insurance, 71,979
3 Car insurance quote, 32,857
4 Woman car insurance, 21,087
5 Young driver car insurance, 17,175
6 Performance car insurance, 12,379
7 Car insurance uk, 11,719
8 aa car insurance, 7,956
9 Online car insurance quote, 7,423
10 Car insurance company, 7,186.

These data suggest the importance of ranking well for high-volume keyphrases such
as ‘cheap car insurance’ and ‘car insurance uk’.

Improving search engine ranking through SEO

Although each search engine has its own algorithm with many weighting factors and
they change through time, fortunately there are common factors that influence search
engine rankings. These are, in approximate order of importance:

1 Frequency of occurrence in body copy
The number of times the key phrase is repeated in the text of the web page is a key factor
in determining the position for a keyphrase. Copy can be written to increase the number
of times a word or phrase is used (technically, its keyphrase density) and ultimately
boost position in the search engine. Note though that search engines make checks that a
phrase is not repeated too many times such as ‘cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap
flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights.. cheap flights..’ or the
keyword is hidden using the same colour text and backgound and will not list the page
if this keyphrase density is too high or it believes ‘search engine spamming’ has
occurred. Relevance is also increased by a gamut of legitimate ‘tricks’ such as including
the keyphrase in headings (

,

), linking anchor text in links and using a higher
density towards the start of the document.

2 Number of inbound links (Page Rank)
The more links you have from good quality sites, the better your ranking will be.
Evaluation of inbound links or backlinks to determine ranking is one of the key reasons

1 SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING