How Search Engines Rank Websites

What do search engines really want? Relevancy!

This means that when someone types in, for example, "hotel in Algarve", the search engine will try to find and display all the sites that have information that is relevant to the key phrase "hotel in Algarve". Simple, isn't it?

Well, no. This is where is gets complicated. Don't forget that search engines are just machines and they have to somehow find a way of measuring relevancy in a quantifiable manner so that they can decide a hierarchy of relevance. This is called ranking.

Search engine "ranking" is a process that search engines use to decide how "important" a website is. A site's rank is determined by numerous factors, which are calculated by a specially formulated calculation (algorithm). There are many factors taken into consideration and each factor gives your site a certain number of "points". Each site is ultimately "judged" by the search engines according to the factors considered and the points earned. The more points, the higher up you appear.

So what are these factors? The bad news is, there are many of them. In fact, so many that we at LeadGenerators have developed a concept in search engine optimisation management called the SEO Puzzle.

One of the key set of factors that search engines can count is how many times each keyword or key phrase appears in the site texts and in each page, in the coding of your site (meta tags), in the titles of each page, in the hyperlinks, in the inbound links. Usually more is better but too many keywords is a mistake. If you exceed a certain number of keywords per page, the search engine will decipher this as an attempt to cheat the system and, like in snakes and ladders, you will go back to the bottom. Each search engine has a different limit and that number is a secret. It's a cruel world out there!

What else do search engines like to see?

Another important factor is how important your peers think you are. It's a form of third party endorsement. In the real world, if one of your major competitors says that you are good, or if you get endorsement from an industry association, that endorsement improves your reputation. For search engines, the only way to measure this "third party endorsement" is by seeing how many links are pointing to your site from other sites. It is important that those sites are considered important and relevant peer sites by search engines and in the same industry sector (major competitors or industry organisations or important suppliers).

How long you have been around on the internet and how often your site changes are also important for the accumulation of points. Search engines know that many sites are actually dead and the only way to measure that you are alive and kicking is if you keep adding content to your site. Over a long period of time, search engines will give you good points for slow, ongoing and consistent change.

These are some of the major factors. But there are more. Navigation issues, Flash and Java scripts, content management and data base sites, Web PR, RSS and blogs, hosting and site maps, to name a few. They are all important and they all give you extra points.

One of the challenges of dealing with search engines is that nothing is revealed and everything has to be estimated…and sometimes guessed. For this reason, to keep ahead of the game of what search engines want, it is important to keep up with all the search engine forums and the ongoing discussions as to who is doing what and opinions as to what works and what delivers good rankings.