How search engines rank websites is a mystery

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How search engines rank web sites, or rather the web pages published on web sites, seems to be completely misunderstood by most business website owners. Since thousands of technical explanations have already been published on this subject, we will try to keep this simple and practical. Every business website owner needs to understand how important search engines are to a business web site success. The opinions that follow are strictly our own and should not be considered as more than well researched, tested and experienced SEO opinions.

The first and the most important thing to understand about every search engine is, search engines are computer programs. Unlike human visitors, they do not form an opinion or emotional response to what they read on any website. They only read the web page information, analyze the words and put the page title on a results list. Where it ranks on that list, is entirely based on how the search engine interprets the web page text information quality. SEO is about providing clear information for search engines to interpret.

Every word, of every phrase, of every sentence of every web page on a web site, has an influence on how a search engine ranks your website. A good search engine optimizer understands how this affects search engine ranking results and can explain how to fix mistakes on your current business web site.

Search engines make millions of dollars selling advertising on their results pages. This makes search engines very interested in attracting as many users as possible. The more times each day that someone clicks on a paid inclusion link, the more revenue the search engine company generates. When you understand that every search engine web site is also a business website you can easily understand what motivates search engine companies.

Search engines rank a web page by a formula

The formula is actually called an algorithm, or a very long sequence of calculations and they constantly evolve. Although the very first search engines simply counted the words on a web page and then ranked the page with the most occurrences of a certain word or phrase at the top of their search engine results pages or SERPS, a lot has changed! Search engine algorithms are now so complex that they are approaching human reasoning. What this means to business owners and web site designers alike is; It's time to play by the rules of the web! Quality information that is original and properly written for search engines, will get the best ranking results.

Search engines read text information very well, but unlike people, search engines can't see pictures. Search engines are blind as bats when they encounter graphics. To search engines, pictures are blank space.

How search engines rank sites by user priority.

Each search engine determines who their targeted user, or customer is and then writes their filtering algorithm to return the best web pages to provide the best quality information to that specific group. The specific page that each search engine gives the highest value to, will be ranked number one. Search engines know what their customer wants and how they use a search engine. Search engines always want to find new customers too! They all find more customers, by being very user friendly.

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Search engines rank page titles

The single most valuable web page ranking component is a good page title. The page title is what each search engine lists on their results pages. A distinctive, descriptive page title that accurately provides a summary of the page information is important. Good page titles help search engines to accurately rank a good web page.

Page names affect ranking results.

Did you notice the name of this page? What do you think this page is about? That's exactly what search engines understand too! Like page titles, the page name that also describes the web page content, will rank higher than a page name like about-us.html or who-we-are.htm. Page names that contain important search words are most likely to rank the highest on the search engine results pages. Dynamically generated web pages reveal a string of code, instead of a real page name.

When you finally choose the best domain name, register your domain name for at least five years. It shows that your site is credible.

Search engines value the RIGHT Domain Name

The best name for a website, will immediately tell search engines what your website information is about. Unless your company name clearly describes your business activities, DON'T USE IT AS A DOMAIN NAME. This is one of the most common website mistakes made by new business site owners. Having "My company.com" may be great for your ego, but it's usually search engine suicide! Unless your company name is full of the keywords that a potential customer would type as a search phrase to find your website, you will lose referrals from search engines.

Search engines rank web pages by the words they contain

Credible information for customers is what a business website is for. The words that are written directly on the web page, are all that describe the business information content to both search engines and your human visitors as well. The words on your logo or other picture graphics are only visible to sighted people, using a graphical browser. They do nothing positive for your search engine ranking. Most business website owners falsely believe that their website is simply another form of advertising. Their web site pages look like a series of magazine ads, with only pictures of products rather than detailed text descriptions of their products or services. This is search engine suicide!

How does Google rank websites?

Google developed a patented ranking system called PageRank to determine the value of an entire web site, as well as the individual web pages it contains. Google's ranking system is partially a popularity contest, where the site with the most incoming links from other web sites that Google deems as important websites (according to Google), will be highly ranked. There is a great deal of controversy about this system and it's value depends largely on your perspective. An old boys network of Google friendly sites does not always provide new information. The method, gives Google complete control over which websites rise too quickly to the top of their organic search results.

In some ways, Google is a victim of it's own success. As the most popular search engine, Google makes up it's own rules about how to rank a new website.

Download the Google desktop bar? If you do, Google tracks your web searches and logs which sites you visit. Do you have concerns about your privacy?

However, as a business website owner, creating a Google friendly website is critically important to your bottom line. Most of your potential customers don't understand how search engines rank the content quality of a website either! More than half of them will use Google, as their primary search engine. To be a highly ranked web site to google? Write a user friendly website and the search engine ranking results will come, in time. A good website, like a good wine, takes time to mature. After the first five years, we now get a few thousand referrals from Google each month. We couldn't possibly handle all the requests for services that Google alone produces. Although we get the most visitors from Google, by far the majority of visitors who become clients come from Yahoo or bing referrals. Maybe they are becoming The decision search engine?

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How does Yahoo rank websites?

In some ways, Yahoo too, uses their algorithm to restrain some websites that would otherwise quickly rank very high. Yahoo will return only the index or Home page for all the relevant search phrases for a period of time. Again, in time Yahoo will rank each web page for the most relevant search phrases. Yahoo is far more concerned about the actual content quality of the website, than pure link popularity. Although good incoming links certainly help the site's ranking result, only time will establish the website as a credible information resource. After some experimenting, we noticed that Yahoo appears to have a quota of how many pages it will list from a given web site on the first results page at a given time. Although we get first page results for quite a few pages, when a new one appears, another disappears for a week or so and they they show up again. We find it more amusing, than a problem. It simply means that Yahoo can't decide which page is the most important, this week.

How does bing rank websites?

Although the smallest of the Big 3 search engines, MSN appears to rank websites by information quality. MSN, ( bing since 2009) will even refuse to index sites that are poorly written and don't use valid markup. Certainly not true of Google page rank.

Live Search website ranking is completely automated. The Live Search ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as web page content, the number and quality of web sites that link to your web pages, and the relevance of your website's content to keywords. The algorithm is complex and is never human-mediated. You can't pay to boost your website's relevance ranking; however, we do offer advertising options for website owners. It seems the bing places a higher value on page names than page titles, but both are important factors.

From MSN

Please note: Although Google was concerned about Yahoo and everybody wanted to buy Yahoo, MicroSoft and Yahoo announced a deal to have MicroSoft's bing produce search results for Yahoo, in July 2009. Eventually, a greater concentration of search engine spiders, may lead to a dilution of organic search results quality. Time will tell.

How search engines rank your website:

Although there are hundreds of search engines, achieving a good rank on the Big 3 (google, yahoo and bing) is critical to your business web site success. This web site was written to provide easy to understand information for business owners. Most business website owners still accept the website myth that a good business website must be a beautiful website and therefore an important website must be very beautiful. It's a myth that ultimately leads to website failure. Your website needs to provide good, accessible information that will provide good answers to your visitors, in order to become highly ranked by every search engine and valuable to your potential customers as well.

Although you are unlikely to have all your web pages appear on the first page search results for any search engine, getting more visitor referrals from search engines requires that at least some of your pages get good results on search engines. A good SEO designer can really help. A user friendly website is also a search engine friendly website and there's a lot more to good SEO than writing meta tags!

Please read: What is a website, before you make any important website, website investment decisions. What is a website worth to your company?

A good SEO knows how search engines value links!

Should you find our search engine ranking information important and wish to link directly to this web page, simply copy and paste the following link text onto any of your site's pages:

<a href="http://www.seowebsitesdesigners.com/search_engine__optimization/how_do_search_engines_rank_websites.html">How search engines rank sites</a>

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Internet search to find good page ranking information

Please note: Google does not provide direct search results, or permit searches from non- exclusive business sites and so they are not included on the search engine list. Please get Google search results directly from www.google.com

Search multiple search engines: yahoo . yahoo.ca . msn . msn.ca . alta vista . ask by pressing each search engine name.