Completely baffled, need input...

[voodooboy]

To lead into this, let me say I am not into SEO. I do not offer it as a service, nor do I claim to now a lot about it much less be an expert.

Last week I used seo-doctor on instantpostion.com. I optimized my title, description and keywords tags and changed all the pages on my site to reflect the changes. I also optimized my alt tags and content on the index page to get a seo-doctor score of 27 out of 30 for the key phrase "Knoxville web design" and 30 out of 30 for "Web Design". Now I have little to no link exchanges going on, all I have is content to work with.

With that said, my (literally non-existent) site went from nothing in the search engines to the following results under "Knoxville web design":

AOL Search:
#7 - Index page ranked

MSN:
#10 - Portfolio page ranked

Yahoo:
#8 - Graphics Services page ranked

Yesterday on Yahoo I was #9 and it was my testimonials page that was ranked.

Google:
#7 - Index page ranked
#13 - Web design Services page ranked

Alta Vista:
#6 - Graphics Services page ranked

All the Web:
#11 - Graphic Services page ranked

Now don't get me wrong, I am not complaining in the least about being on the first page and doing it all myself. I consider it a personal achievement to get this high on one rework. My concern is the diversity in the pages that are being ranked. For example, my Graphics Services page does not reference web design as I have a separate page for that; but it gets ranked in "Alta Vista", "All the Web", and "Yahoo", while the only fully optimized page (the Index page) is only listed in Google and AOL Search.

What I want to know, is what does this say about how search engines rank site pages, and how can I get the index page to rank higher than the others? Or is it even possible?

And since I am asking for input, I have noticed that Yahoo has updated only certain pages of my site. The index page and a couple others still show the old title and content. Is there a way to get yahoo to update the search content for all my pages?

All feedback would be appreciated.

[SWTechnologies]

Hey ghstdrgns,

I experienced the same results as you. The site I'm working on has been around for quite some time now and has a good number of quality links back to it, but the text, alt tags, etc... weren't optimized. I recently optimized the majority of pages for targeted keywords and experienced improvements in my rankings with 16 #1 placements (although I still having problems getting ranked by Yahoo!). What I found funny was exactly what your were referring to, some pages that were optimized for one phrase generated improvements for other phrases that weren't even on the page... After thinking about it, the only explanation I could think of was the internal linking scheme.

I'd appreciate thoughts/comments from others, but could it be that a search engine established that page 'X' is optimized really well for 1 keyword that also has links to page 'Y'. Therefore the search engine increases the rankings of both page 'X' and 'Y' for that keyword (obviously X more then Y, but Y still experiences improvements)? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

As per your thoughts on Yahoo indexing some pages and not others, and getting your site index faster... What I've picked up along the way is that search engines crawl the web as a web, when they get to a link that points to your page, they spider it. If you have links on that page pointing to other pages in your site, they will follow them and index that page as well. How is your internal linking scheme, do you have a link to your site map on each page? Do you have a site map?

In order to get the search engines to come back sooner, you can resubmit your pages for review following an update/changes, but there is no guarantee as to when they'll get around to it. The only true way to get them to crawl your pages faster and more regularly is to pay them too... Is your content changing enough to justify this?

Well, these are just some things I've picked up along my travels :), if anyone else has a better understanding or can provide some additional insight, I think we'd both be eager to hear it.

SWTechnologies

[wildgopher_com]

I have had the same experiences.

Ranked well in google and yahoo - before we even showed a google PR score (we are a new site).

It was interesting how it worked. We showed well in google at first.. Then we got dropped from google (disappeared from the first page anyway) after some of our other parked domains on register.com started showing on the first page too (by default we were forwarding to our site ip for the domains we weren't using - frustrating).
But soon after google we started appearing well on yahoo where we still do today. Number one for one search that has results of 1.6 million - in fact we are on the first page more than once.

I wonder of the weighting of back links is no longer as important as it was before - as we have very, very few and even less when we started showing on the major engines.
I noticed with google title and order of title was a big key to ranking well in the results..
It almost seems like the previous keyword opt principles are back.
Tom