World's Best Web Designer

Am I really the world's best web designer?

In a word: No. In two words: No, No. But what I am doing is not showing I am the world's best web designer but I'm showing how search engines work (a little of how they work anyway). And that's nothing to do with being the world's best web designer.

You see, a search engine doesn't know how to look at a page like you or me and say "He's the world's best web designer." Because that's a subjective thing. No, what the search engine does is set down a range of basic criteria and sees if the site meets those.

Basically, different factors get different scores.

Best web designer - world champion?

Take a look at the page title.

By this I mean the title at the top of the page (above File Edit Etc). Notice how I've called this page: "World's best web designer - Brendon Sinclair"

The search engine looks to that for a clue what the page is about. Next, notice that the name of the page is www.tailored.com.au/worlds-best-web-designer.htm. Now that's good (used to be a more important factor). It's another clue for the search engine.

Moving right along, you'll see the big heading is "World's Best Web Designer", the sub-heading is "Am I really the world's best web designer?"

I did that to get the term "world's best web designer" in the headings. Then I launch into the page copy and mention the words "world's best web designer?" quite a bit.

Now, surprisingly, the term "world's best web designer" isn't that competitive on Google. The company that is number 1 isn't specifically targeting the phrase, which means it should be fairly easy to get a high ranking for the term (having said that, many web firms - like me - have highly ranked sites and they can be harder to beat than a 'normal' site).

A Little Deceiving

I do notice that the company that comes up # 1 at the moment also comes up # 1 for the search term "Internet Marketing Coach" and then proudly proclaims on their web site that they are "Ranked #1 Top Internet Marketing Coach in search engines"

That doesn't mean they are the best at Internet Marketing Coaching, it just means their site comes up # 1 for that term. That's a bit sneaky.

The other reason this page - world's best web designer - will get a high ranking on search engines is because I'll link to it from my 'Articles' page. The articles page has what's called a 'PageRank' 5 - which means the link to this page carries some credibility.

What basically happens is the search engine looks at the link and says "Wow, a link from a PageRank 5 page. This page must be good - let's give it a higher ranking."

If I had lots and lots of links to this world's best web designer page my ranking would be higher for that term. But I'll just stop here and see if this does the job (I'm guessing a top 6 spot for the term "world's best web designer" - on Google).

Click here for a search engine optimisation book review I recently did.

Date of writing: May 11, 2005

Update May 18, 2006: For the past 6 months or so, this page has been either # 1 or # 2 for the term "worlds best web designer" in Google. So that's a bit better than I thought I'd get - generally it takes a few more links to a page than this page has to get a decent ranking (but this site is old, trusted and has lots of content - and search engines love that).

Brendon Sinclair