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Article:
The Latest Innovation in Search Engine Algorithms . . . User Popularity by: Robin Nobles For years, the search engines have continued to introduce new factors into their algorithms to make their search results more relevant and to keep savvy search engine marketers from 'cracking the system.' We've seen many ranking factors come and go in importance. For example, years ago, META tags were the key to success, or so we thought. Stick in META tags that were loaded with your keyword phrases, and you were sure to achieve top rankings. Then, we had keyword weight as a ranking factor. We struggled to determine the keyword weight of our competitors' pages, then duplicate that weight in all of the various areas of our pages. Along came link popularity, and with it, the massive link farms and link exchange programs. Web site owners joined as many as they could in an effort to boost the sheer number of incoming links pointing to their sites. In the midst of these evolving ranking factors came changes to page components like the title tag. Put your keyword at the beginning of the tag for maximum ranking potential. Oops. Things have changed. Put your keyword as the 3rd and 4th words in the title tag. Wait - let's try the 2nd and 3rd words. These are just a few of the ranking factors that have come into play over the last several years. Can you see the potential for problems here? After all, including keywords in your META tags doesn't mean that the page is more relevant for those keywords. Just because you have '12
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