How do search engines rank web pages?

This section is a bit technical but it will help you to understand how search engines specify the position of a web page in the search results. Search engines use mathematical formulas to determine the rank of a web page. These mathematical formulas are called ranking algorithms. Although search engines don't reveal the exact algorithms. All major search engines use the same principle to rank websites. The exact ranking algorithms differ from search engine to search engine but the principle is the same. We'll use the ranking algorithm of Google as an example.


How does Google rank your web pages?

Google explains the ranking algorithm on their company pages:

"Traditional search engines rely heavily on how often a word appears on a web page. Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important.

It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first."

As mentioned in the quote, Google uses PageRank (which is a mathematical formula and not the same as the green bar in the Google toolbar) and hypertext-matching analysis to rank your web pages. What does this mean?


1. You need good links

To get good results for the PageRank factor, you need good links from related pages that point to your site. It's a simple principle: if page a links to page b then it is a recommendation from page a to page b. The more links point to your website, the better your rankings.

The quality of the links is also important. A link that contains the keyword for which you want to have high rankings in the link text is better than five links with the text Click here. A link from a website that has a related topic is much better than links from unrelated sites or link lists.



2. You need optimized web page content

While the linking concept is easy to understand, the hypertext-matching analysis factor is a bit more complicated. Google explains hypertext-matching analysis as follows:

"Hypertext-Matching Analysis: Google's search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google's technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word.

Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query."

As Google analyzes the full content of your pages you also have to optimize the full content of your web pages. It is not enough to edit your meta tags. You have to optimize all factors that can influence your search engine rankings.


One page is not enough

As mentioned in the explanation of Google's hypertext-matching analysis, Google also analyzes the content of other web pages on your site to ensure that your web page is really relevant.

That means that you must optimize different pages of your website for different but related search terms. The more web pages of your website are optimized for keywords about a special topic, the more likely it is that you'll get high rankings for a special keyword that is related to that topic.

It is not enough to optimize a single web page.

Why do you have to optimize your web pages?

Some people think that it is enough to submit a website to as many search engines as possible to get high rankings. Unfortunately, that is not the case. If you do not optimize your web pages, then you won't get high search engine rankings.


1. Not all websites can have high rankings

There are billions of web pages on the Internet. It's obvious that not all of them can be listed in the top 10 results on search engines. Search engines only list web pages that they find relevant to a special keyword. You must make sure that your website is such a site.

If search engines cannot find out that your website is about fishing equipment, they cannot give your website high rankings for that keyword. The process of changing your web pages so that search engines find them relevant is called search engine optimization, seo.


2. Your website must appear in the top 10 results

75% of searchers never look further than page one. Most search engines display ten results on the first page; and very few searchers click the links to look at the second page.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out: "Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results." Danny Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine Marketing Columnist, puts it out this way: "Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your website."

For that reason, search engine optimization is crucial if you want to be successful with your website.

Why do high search engine rankings increase your sales?

High search engine rankings are the perfect way to get more website visitors, more customers and more sales. Recent statistics show that having high search engine rankings is the key to the success of your online business:


1. Your customers are on the Internet and they have money

More than 1 billion people use the Internet (Source: Nielsen/NetRatings). Web users spend twice as much time online as watching TV (Source: Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society). Consumers spend more than $143.2 billion online per year.



2. Your customers use search engines

More than 80% of all Internet users find new websites through search engines (Source: Georgia Tech/GVU Users Survey). That means that millions use search engines every day to find websites.



3. These people are interested in your goods and services

Search engine users are some of the most qualified and motivated visitors to your website you will ever have. After all, they have taken the initiative to hunt for online resources on a certain topic. And then they clicked your link to learn more.

My blog helps you to get your website in front of these potential customers. In other words, this blog helps you to make sure that your website is seen by people who want to buy your goods and services.

The basics

Before you start to optimize your web pages, you should know some things about website promotion and search engine optimization. In this chapter, you'll learn how search engine optimization will help you to get more customers and more sales. You'll also learn which things you should avoid.

Indexing a web page

After a web page is crawled, the next important step is to index its content. The indexed web page is stored in a giant database on servers around all the world, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the key words and expressions that best describe the web page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information, but also generally search engines like google deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a web page right but if you help them by optimizing it, it will be easier for them to classify your web pages correctly and for you, to get some higher ranking.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database on the servers around the world. Since it is likely that more than one page contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string and algorithms. There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy od a content or a web site. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like a keyword density, internal and external links, description... That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string in order to et the best and relevants content.

What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Google or Yahoo etc. periodically change their algorithms (every month) and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes of this important algorithms. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to seo, if you'd like to be at the top of search results. The last step in search engines is activity and retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser, the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant web sites.

How Search Engines Work

Do you know how search engines work? The first basic truth you need to know about seo is to learn that SEO are not humans. While this maybe might be obvious for everybody, the differences between how humans and search engines like google view web pages aren't. Unlike humans search engines are text-driven to webpages. Although technology advances rapidly, also search engines are far from intelligent creatures that can feel the beauty of a cool design or enjoy the sounds and movement in great movies. Instead, search engines crawl the webmaround the world, looking at particular site items "mainly text" to get an idea what a site is about. This brief explanation is not the most precise because as we will see next, search engines perform several activities in order to deliver quality search results that matters – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving all this data.

First step, search engines (like google) crawl the web to see what is there for data. This task is performed by a piece of software, called a crawler or googlebot, as is the case with Google. Spiders are follow all links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way in the world wide web. Having in mind the number of pages on the web (over 50 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared, or if an existing page has done some modifications, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two if there is no new data to crawl.

What you can do for better ranging of your website is to check what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans and they do not see images or other things like flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories. If they are not viewable, they will not be spidered and also not indexed in the search engine, and ranking.

All seo steps are very imprtant, so be aware of what you are doing when you creat a new website.

What Is SEO?

Whenever you enter a search query in a search engine and hit enter you get a detailed list of web results that contain that query term. Users are normally tend to visit websites that are high at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the search query. If you have ever wondered why some of these websites and web locations rank better than the others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

SEO is a great technique which helps search engines find and rank for your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query you are entered. SEO helps you to get more traffic from search engines like google yahoo or bing. This seo tutorial covers all the important and necessary information you need to know about Search Engine Optimization for your web site and - what is it, how does it work and differences in the ranking criteria of major search engines like google.