Results rankings not based on page title

[nixta78]

Hey everyone,

Hopefully you can give me some advice on things to try. I have been trying very hard to get my page results to show up based on the page title, URL, and heading but it's not working as well as I had hoped.

For example, my Stock Quotes page should show up as #1.
Page Title: HowTheMarketWorks.com - Stock Quotes
Heading: Stock Quotes
URL: http://www.howthemarketworks.com/trading/stock-quotes.php

However, this shows up as #7 in the results!
I've set the boost to the maximum level (+5) for filename, title, and heading but it doesn't seem to help.

Go ahead and do a search for Stock Quotes on my site and you'll see what I mean.

Thanks!
Nick

[David]

Some tips,

- While playing with the rankings you should turn on the display of the score. This will help you see how changes in the settings effect the results.

- You have unmatched <!--ZOOMSTOP--> <!--ZOOMRESTART--> tags on your pages. For each ZOOMSTOP you must have a ZOOMRESTART. This means you are not skipping the text that you thing you are and will effect the rankings. You should skip all text that is common to all pages (e.g. headers, footers, navigation, etc..)

- You meta description appears to be the same on all the pages I looked at. You should customise the description so that it describes the page.

- Some (maybe all?) of your pages appear to have almost the same keywords. "virtual trading, paper trading, fantasy trading, practice trading, stock, stock market". However some pages had 1 or 2 extra words. Keywords that describe the page are better than using almost the same set on each page.

- Rather than using CSS like this for headings, <td class="contentheading">, you might be better of using using <H1></H1> and <H2></H2>. Zoom will then know that this text is an important heading and push up the rankings for that text.

- The stock quotes page really doesn't have any content (after you ignore your common header, footer, right navigation, left navigation, top navigation, etc..). If the page had some text content that talked about stock quotes that would help.

- You can use recommended links to force the page to the #1 position if required.

- You should probably turn off '-' as a join character in Zoom. Then the file name will become more relevant to the search and push the page up for these terms.

- You can add keywords especially for Zoom, e.g..
<meta name="ZOOMWORDS" content="stock quote, symbol quote, quotes, price, stock lookup look-up look up">

- You could boost all the text on the page with this tag.
<meta name="ZOOMPAGEBOOST" content="3">

See also this FAQ page about result rankings.

[nixta78]

Hi, thanks very much for the tips. I tried some more settings and they helped a little bit, but I think the real problem is I don't have any relevant content on my Stock Quotes page.

So my solution is to use the Recommended Links features for this page and others like it. Actually, it's quite helpful to look at the searchwords.log file to see what your visitors are searching for and to see if your search results are going to the pages you want them to.