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Before your website can
rank highly in the search engines, it is important to understand how
search engines work.
In order for search
engines to tell you where to find information, it must find the
information first. To find the millions and millions of global web pages
that exist, the search engines use programs called 'spiders', or
robots. These spiders crawl the web and build indexes of URLs, keywords
found on web pages and other pertinent information.
The search engines are
basically made of three parts: the spider, the index and the software.
The spider visits a web
page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the
website. This is what 'crawling' is generally referred to. The spiders
return to the site (frequency depends on varying factors)
to look for changes.
Once the spider has
crawled your site it adds all the information it found to the index.
Sometimes referred to as a catalogue, it's like a giant book containing
a copy of every single page a search engine spider finds. If a web page
changes, then the index gets updated with the new content. Sometimes it
can take some time for new pages or content to be included in the index.
This means you may see a visit by a search engine spider in your log
files, but is not yet indexed. Until your web pages are indexed, it is
not available to people searching with search engines.
So your pages are now indexed - how do the search engines decide who
comes first?
While each search engines
has its own unique way of ranking web pages (algorithms) there
are common themes that they all share.
Like in real estate, it's
all about location, location, location. The more prominently you place
keywords important to your website, the more relevant your website
appears to be for those particular keywords. Frequency also plays a role
-- repeated too few times and you lose relevancy, yet repeated too many
times and you can be seen as spamming the search engines. There is a
delicate balance that must be reached between location and frequency.
The weight placed on each
location also varies between search engines. That is why search results
will often be different among the various search engines.
However, keyword
placement and frequency are not all that the search engines look at in
order to rank pages by relevancy. There are other variables that come
into play that are commonly referred to as "off-page" factors. These
off-page factors include the number of incoming inks to your site and
click-through measurement.
The incoming links show
the search engines how 'popular' you are among sites with similar topics
or themes. Essentially, the more links or 'votes' you have, the better.
However, the search engines do have sophisticated techniques that are
used to screen out attempts by websites to build artificial links
designed specifically to increase their placement in the search engines.
Click-through measurement
is a way for the search engines to watch what results searchers click on
for any given search term. Through this analysis the search engines may
'drop' pages from its top rankings and 'boost' lower ranked pages if
they are generating more clicks than the top-ranked pages.
Simplified view of spiders crawling
the web.
To learn more about an
Internet Solution that really works for your
business, use the form on "Contact Us" page to
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