Web site Design and Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Ranking

How do search engines rank Web sites?

Search engines hold databases of millions of Web sites and Web pages. Just being listed by a search engine may not attract visitors to your site. Few surfers will continue moving down the rankings beyond the first thirty or forty - three to four pages. You may achieve high ranking by paying some search engines on a pay-per-click basis. Many surfers are aware of this facility and may use non-pay-per-click search engines in preference.

Each search engine develops its own unique algorithm (a form of program) that will determine a score for each keyword on Web pages that it ranks. As the algorithms of each search engine is different, your Web pages may receive high ranking on one search engine but poor ranking on another. ^{pay
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Search engine algorithms change from time to time and many new Web sites arrive each day. Serious Webmasters will spend time updating their Web sites and reviewing submissions to search engines to enhance their rankings.

Search engines use selected software programs to search their indexes for matching keywords and phrases, presenting their findings to you in some kind of relevance ranking. No two search engines are exactly the same in terms of size, speed and content; no two search engines use exactly the same ranking schemes, and not every search engine offers you exactly the same search options. Therefore, your search is going to be different on every engine you use. The difference may not be a lot, but it could be significant. Search engines overlap at approximately 60 percent and unique content at around 40 percent.

In ranking web pages, search engines follow a certain set of rules. These may vary from one engine to another. Their goal is to return the most relevant pages at the top of their lists. To do this, they look for the location and frequency of keywords and phrases in the web page document and, sometimes, in the HTML META tags. They check out the title field and scan the headers and text near the top of the document. Some of them assess popularity by the number of links that are pointing to sites; the more links, the greater the popularity, i.e., value of the page.

The most important part of a Web page is what appears at the very top of the page. A search engine starts at the top of the page and begins moving down as it indexes. So, what appears in the <head> section of your Web page is very important, because the <head> section is at the top of the page.

The importance of good ranking can be seen from the following data according to 7search.com (21st July 2003) http://conversion.7search.com/scripts/advertisertools/keywordsuggestion.aspx

Rank

% of traffic

3.75

2.5

1.75

1.25

0.75

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.35

What are Search Engine Algorithms?

Search Engine companies share the same motivation as you - they want to increase their traffic to their site. To accomplish this they use a set of rules called algorithms. When a search engine receives a search query they use their algorithm as part of their ranking techniques to supply the most suitable Web sites and Web pages. Search engines keep their algorithms secret to prevent Webmasters from dominating their searches. Furthermore, they change their algorithms frequently to provide surfers with new top ranked sites.

Search engines are wise to spamming (cheating) methods such as hidden text, hidden links, repetition of keywords in META tags, doorway pages. If they catch Webmasters cheating they will penalise the Web site and probably other sites belonging to that Webmaster. The search engines want Webmasters to behave appropriately and they accept that experts on Search Engine Optimization may have a degree of insight. Essentially search engines are looking for:

Sites with quality content.
Uncomplicated pages with the focus on content.
Ease of navigation.
Keyword rich text.
Title tags, META tags and image alt tags relevant to the keywords.
The majority of hyperlinks should be with text rather than graphics.
Avoid frames as they are not read by the majority of Web robots.
No spamming.
Links to and from relevant sites.
The ranking of linking pages to your Web site.
Link Popularity - The majority of Experts in Search Engine Optimization believe that the more sites that link to yours the higher you are likely to rank. Those linking sites that are particularly relevant to yours are most likely to push your rankings up.
The sites should have a theme rather than being all-embracing.
The number of times that your keywords appear in the text - keyword density
Click through rate and surfer satisfaction - several search engines determine how long your visitors stay on your site or do not return to the Search Engine to follow the same search.

The only people who know the current search engine algorithms are the programmers and they do not divulge this to anyone. As the change their algorithms regularly, it is not possible for anyone to offer a guaranteed package that will always lead to high rankings. It is only possible to indicated they key factors and then every Webmaster should experiment to see how they can best achieve high rankings.