How Search Engines rank Web Sites
When you search for a topic using a major search engine, results will display by the tens of thousands nearly instantly. No, it's not wizardry. The search engine has not sorted through the Internet just now but has searched millions of pages (collected during its relentless crawls) in its database and has come up with the matches to your search query. The matches are then ranked, based on “relevancy” . More on relevancy in a moment.
Let's say you visit your library searching for a book on a particular topic. The librarian will retrieve books for you based on the subject you choose, but if your subject is too general, he/she will ask you for clarification, i.e.: you will need to narrow down your topic. A search engine is not a librarian and has no idea what you really want when you type in a general expression. But what a search engine will do is take the information (usually residing on a web site) the contents of which most closely match the requested information, and then rank it in descending order of importance, or relevancy.
And this content is simply what the web designer or webmaster has written into the web site, either explicitly in the content text, or - implicitly - as a set of logical connections, by way of internal and external links to the individual web pages.
So it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the better designed and written a web site, the
more relevant its contents will be for the search engines. Increased relevance will, in turn, rank the
site higher on the search engines' results pages.
But how do search engines determine this mysterious relevancy when millions of stored pages have
to be sorted through? They sort by a set of rules, known as algorithms. Each crawler-based search engine has its own closely guarded and secret algorithms, but generally those rules are determined by very practical, common-sense guidelines (Of course, there are other rules, too).
If the webmaster attaches great value to certain words (keywords) important or relevant to his web site and displays them prominently, the search engine will consider those words important too.
Imagine a newspaper editor who buries highly important and relevant content in a major news story somewhere in the tenth paragraph, and in small print to boot. Such copy would almost certainly remain unread, except by the most diligent readers. The same goes for a web site.
Would a search engine give high rankings to a web page that doesn’t even “rank” its own contents highly? You bet it won’t.
The rule of the thumb, therefore, is quite simple: make your web site's contents as important as possible, and your web site, in turn, will be held in higher esteem by the search engines. Just
how much more important, depends on many factors - the Ranking Factors.
|
