Blog

Search for anything using a search engine. Almost instantly, the search engine will go through the millions of listings it has in its database and present you with ones that match your search topic. The matches will be ordered, the sites that are the most relevant are suppose to come up first.

Search engines frequently do not give you exactly what you ask for, often to find what your looking for you will need to rephrase your search in different ways. Unfortunately, search engines aren’t human, so they can’t ask you questions to narrow the search and compare it to what’s in their database. How do search engines decide what is the most relevant web site? They follow a math equation called an algorithm, there are a number of factors involved but primarily frequency and location of the keywords on the web page is what determines relevancy.

What are the major factors?

If you ask a search engine to search for a topic the first place they look is at the titles of the listings in their database. The majority of search engines consider the title to be the most significant factor when judging its relevance.

Another place they look is at the first few lines of text on the page. The theory behind this is that information at the top of the web site is the most significant, that’s why its at the top of the web site, on most web sites this is true. Most companies usually mention what their site is about right at the top of the page in large lettering but not always.

Search engines also determine relevancy by how often the key word appears on the page, this is called frequency. They do this by comparing the number of time the key word is used by the number of words on the page. This has led many people to believe that just by repeating the key words over and over they could improve there listings in the search engine. This is a complete falsity as a mater of fact over repetition of a key word will actual lessen your ranking, if not make it disappear all together.

Every search engine does it slightly differently!

All search engines use the same basic method and work from the information mentioned above. After that they like to mix it up a bit by varying there requirements from one another, one might want more frequency or less, others will place more importance on a particular part of the page. Since no search engine determines ranking exactly the same way, every search engine will give you a different list of results. Some search engines index more sites than others. Some search engines also index sites more often than others. Because of this every search engine has different information contained in there database and will produce different results from one another.

Search engines may also give web sites higher ranking for certain reasons. Several engines use “link popularity” as part of its ranking method. It can tell which of the pages in its index have a lot of links pointing at them. These pages are given a slightly higher ranking, since a page with many links to it is probably well regarded on the Internet.

Meta tags are what many people mistakenly assume are the “secret” to getting their web site to the top of the rankings. Some search engines used to give a slight higher ranking to sites with keywords in their meta tags. But the majority doesn’t read them at all, and there are plenty of examples where sites without meta tags still get highly ranked. They can be part of the ranking, but they are not the “secret”.

As a matter of fact there is no real secret to achieving good ranking. All of the information you need to be able to achieve a high ranking is published on the Internet and some search engines out right state what they want, the problem is a large majority of people think its some kind of magic and are looking for a covert method of achieving their goal. THIS NEVER WORKS FOR LONG! Even if you find some method to trick a search engine into giving you a good position they will inevitably find a way around you and you have wasted your time.

Search engines also penalize sites or ban them completely from their index, if they detect “search engine spamming”. An example is when a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and try to achieve higher ranking in the listings. Search engines are always on the look out for common spamming methods and if you want to achieve high ranking you must follow their rules and play the game right.

My advice to you if your looking for good positions in a search engine is BE HONEST good content appropriate to what you actual want to be found for and a well built site that has a lot of content will do more for you than anything else.