Inward link popularity is the most important single factor determining page rank, particularly with Google. Emphasis is on the number and importance (i.e. page rank) of sites referring links to the site being crawled *2.

One way to increase inward links is to submit the site to online directories and forums that relate to the site theme.

The title is generally held as the highest textual regard by search engines after the URL. The title is for defining the characters typically displayed in the title bar at the top of the browser window. Care should be taken to ensure that keywords were placed close together as proximity is an important factor in ranking. The first letter of each was capitalised to increase relevance for AllTheWeb search engine (*7).

AllTheWeb will consider up to 85 title characters (*7) so packing titles with keywords can increase page-rank (*6).

Google however truncates titles at 40 characters with preference going to words toward the start (see chart *9). This was applied to the home page by entering the keywords at the start of the title.

The page content should include as many keyword references as reasonably possible (Google places strong emphasis on keyword density. This is less relevant for AllTheWeb, which only indexes the first two occurrences of any keyword).

Keywords should be kept in close proximity in the home page content to increase the keyword density (also know as weight). The keyword density represents an Important part of the ranking algorithm used by both search engines *3. However excessive keyword use can result in a decrease in page rank should the search engine consider it Spamming (*8). This was considered whist designing the page content.

Search engines factor outward links into their page-rank calculations and often give them higher weighting than regular text. Caution should be made not overdo the outward links to non-relevant sites as these dilute the page-rank applied by the search engines *5.

Meta Tags are not used by either search engine specifically for ranking or indexing purposes but Goggle uses the description as display text in the search results (*1). Thus a brief synopsis of the page was entered into this section:

<meta name="description" content="Academic Information Regarding MSc Student Benjamin Stopford">

Meta tags were also used to explicitly define the character set to be used for display purposes by the browser.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-2022-JP">

Finally the keywords tag can be added as it is utilised by AllTheWeb but not by Google (*7).

<META name="keywords" content="ben, benjamin, stopford, msc">

*1 http://www.searchengineoptimisationexperts.co.uk/search-engine-tips.html

*2 http://www.clear-help.com/search-engine-tutorials/link-popularity.html

*3 http://www.searchengines.com/searchEnginesRankings.html

*4 http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/link_popularity/4 (viewing backward links)

*5 http://www.zodiac-x-files.com/links.html

*6 http://www.seologic.com/optimization-ranking-submission/fast-all-the-web.php

*7 http://www.internetmarketingwebsites.com/alltheweb.htm

*8 http://www.topwebsite.co.uk/spamming.shtml

*9 http://www.searchengineworld.com/google/keyword_title_position.htm