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How Search Engines Rank Web Sites

Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites. That’s why a web site with good search engine listings may see a dramatic increase in traffic.

As discussed in earlier articles, search engines consist of “spiders” or “robots” that index web pages. If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes and that can affect how you are listed. Each search engine follows a set of rules, known as an algorithm. While we aren’t privy to exactly how each search engine’s algorithm works, there are some general rules that all major search engines follow.

One of the foremost rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Pages that have search terms appearing in the HTML Title Tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others relating to the topic. Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first couple of paragraphs of text. Frequency is the other important element in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words on a page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages.

While this is a general rule, not one search engine indexes exactly the same way which is why the same search on different search engines produces different results. Beware that search engines may also penalize pages or exclude them from the 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 obtain a higher ranking.

Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. Because of this, all major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria.

“Off the page” factors are those that a webmaster cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be important and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build “artificial” links designed to boost their rankings.

Another “off the page” factor is the click through measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren’t attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors.

Remember to analyze your monthly statistics reports on a regular basis to improve the performance of your web site. As a client of WebsiteDesigner.Com, these statistics are always available to you – call or e-mail us for help in accessing this information.

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