SEO 3: How Search Engines rank Web Sites
When you search for a topic using a major search engine, results will be displayed by the tens of thousands nearly instantly. No, it's not wizardry. And no, the search engine has not raced through the Internet in a second. It has "merely" 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 “relevance”.
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 compare the search query to the information in their databases, find the contents which most closely match the requested information, and then rank them in order of importance, or relevance, with the most important contents displayed first.
And these contents (as mentioned, regularly collected by the search engines) are simply what web designers or webmasters have written into their web sites, either explicitly in the copy, 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 what is a "better designed or written" web site? And how does relevance work?
It is extremely important to know this, or else it is virtually impossible to understand, let alone apply SEO.
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