How do search engines rank websites?

How search engines rank websites is a mystery to most website owners

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

The first and the most important thing to understand is, search engines are computer programs. They do not form opinions or an emotional response to what they read on any website. They only read the web page information, analyze it and put it on a list. Where it ends up on that list, is entirely based on the way the search engine interprets the page text information content. SEO is about providing the good information for search engines to interpret.

Every word, of every phrase, of every sentence of every web page on your website, has an influence on how a search engine ranks your website. A good SEO understands how this affects website ranking.

Search engines ranking results are BIG business for search engines too

Search engines make millions of dollars selling paid 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. Understanding that every search engine website is also a business web site is important to understanding what motivates search engine companies.

How search engines rank websites is determined by a secret formula

The formula is actually an algorithm, or a very long sequence of calculations. 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 engines rank websites by the text they can read

Search engines rank text information very well, but search engines can't see any pictures. Search engines are all blind as bats when they encounter graphics. To search engines, pictures are simply blank space.

Every search engine reads, stores and returns page titles

The single most valuable web page ranking component is the 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 the page.

Page names are important to each search engines ranking algorithm.

Did you notice the name of this page? What do you think this page is about? That's exactly what search engines understand too! The page name that best describes the page content, will rank higher than a page name like about-us or who-we-are. Page names that contain important search words are most likely to rank the highest on the search engines results pages.

Search engines value a good domain name for good website ranking

Search engines rank web pages by the words they contain

Search engines rank websites based on the search engine's business priority.

Each search engine determines who their target user group or customer is and then writes their filtering algorithm to return web pages that will provide the most focused information to that specific group. The specific page that each search engine gives the highest value to, will be number one. Search engines know their customer group and how they use search engines. Search engines need to find new customers too!

How does Google's search engine rank websites?

Google developed a unique website ranking system called PageRank to determine the value of an entire website, as well as the individual web pages it contains. Google's ranking system is basically a popularity contest, where the website with the most incoming links from other websites that Google deems as important websites (according to Google), will be itself, 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 necessarily provide good, new information. It does however, give Google complete control over which websites become highly ranked in their organic search results.

In some ways, Google is a victim of it's own success. As the most popular search engine, Google often makes up it's own rules about how it ranks websites.

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

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 websites either! Nearly half of them will use Google, as their primary search engine. To be a highly ranked website to google? Write a good website and the search engine ranking results will come, in time.

A good website, like a good wine, always takes time to mature.

How does the Yahoo search engine rank websites?

In some ways, Yahoo uses their algorithm to restrain some websites that would otherwise 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 webpage for the most relevant search phrases. Yahoo is far more concerned about the content quality of the website, than it's 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.

How does the MSN search engine rank websites?

Although the smallest of the Big 3 search engines, MSN appears to rank websites strictly on their information and website quality. MSN will even refuse to index websites that are poorly written and don't use valid markup. Certainly not true for Google.

Live Search website ranking is completely automated. The Live Search ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as web page content, the number and quality of websites that link to your 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.

How search engines rank websites summary

Although there are hundreds of search engines, achieving a good rank on the Big 3 (google, yahoo and msn) is critical to your business website. This website was written to provide understandable information to business website owners. Most business website owners believe that a good business site will be a beautiful website and therefore good business web site designs must be beautiful. It's a myth. Your website needs to provide good, accessible information that will provide good answers to your visitors, to become highly ranked on every search engine and valuable to your potential customer as well.

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

Please read: What is a website, before you make any important business web design decisions. What is a good business web site worth to your company?

See also: How to improve Search engines ranking questions or Need to find a good SEO?

[ Top of Page ]

[ Your E-mail Feedback? (E) ]

[ Content ]

If you find our search engines information useful 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</a>

[ Good site map (s) ]

[ d ]