SEO Tips-How Search Engines Determine Your Website Rankings
by Bill Parlaman
Filed under Bill's Blog, SEO Tips
OK, yesterday you and I discussed how the search engines crawl websites and store all the information for later use.
Today, you’ll uncover just how the search engines retrieve all that information and how they present it to you.
First, it’s important to understand the the search engine’s job is to provide you with a list of relevant web pages which are most likely to satisfy your needs after you’ve typed a search request.
Once you’ve typed your search request, the search engines perform several functions in order to return the best possible choices of web documents to satisfy your search request.
The search engines must quickly scan billions of documents only returning results that are related to the searchers request and then rank the results in order of “perceived importance.”
1.Relevance: “Relevant search” requires the search engines to provide documents (web pages, pdf’s, images and videos) that match the keywords and keyword phrases a searcher types into the search engine. This is why it’s so important to have your keywords listed in your content, your title tags, in your headlines and sub headlines using your <h1> tags and in the anchor text when other sites link to yours.
It’s important to understand being relevant only puts your website at the train station. It’s page “importance” that determines if you get on the train or not.
2.Importance: So once the search engines determine which web pages are relevant, web page importance is used to determine what order each page should be ranked.
In more simple terms, this is how the search engines determine which pages to rank 1st, 2nd 3rd and so on from a group of similar(and relevant) web pages.
Understanding importance is a little more tricky because there are several factors that influence importance.
For example, the age of your domain, how many links you have coming into your site from other “important sites” and the page rank of your website just to name a few.
So if you want your website to rank on the 1st page of Google for a particular keyword, you need to make sure you’re web pages are optimized for being both relevant and important!
Now get busy, Bill Parlaman
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