Search engine basics

THE RULES THE SEARCH ENGINES USE

More than 80% of all Internet users find new web sites through search engines.

Each search engines uses a different set of rules for ranking your webpages, and not only this, but the sets of rules are continually updated and changed to try and improve the search results.

When a surfer searches the internet with a search engine, they specify the "keyword/s" or phrase that they are searching for. The search engine does 2 things...

• it spiders its database of indexed pages and throws back a list of results
• it ranks the results according to its set of rules.

These are the most important factors that determine a website's rank in the major search engines today...

• Title and Meta tags
• Web page content and internal links
• Link popularity
• The structure of the url

THE TITLE AND META TAGS

These tags used to be essential in determining a web page's ranking however these days link popularity is more important. You should still however still use these tags because many search engines do still include them in their ranking algorithms. The TITLE tag is also the text that appears in the titlebar on your browser.

NOW when you design a webpage, the HEAD area contains the TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS tags. Therefore you have to be very careful in your website design to give the page a good eye-catching TITLE and DESCRIPTION because that is often what is going to make a surfer click on your site. It must be relevant to what they are looking for and it must look interesting.

To help your web page ranking, the web page must contain the keyword/s that you want a surfer to find your site with. So put yourself in the visitor's shoes or ask someone else what they would type in to find your particular product or service. Then make sure you include these keywords in your TITLE, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORDS tags.

The Description and Keywords tags are called META tags. For more details about the HEAD and BODY area and tags, see our HTML tutorial on our website here.

WEB PAGE CONTENT AND INTERNAL LINKS

Remember that words are the building blocks of your web page. They must count somehow in the web page ranking.

1) You must also include the keyword/s in the content of your page, in the "Alt" tags for images, in a HEADING tag, and in a HYPERLINK, and how many times you do this and where they are placed on your webpage all affect the search engine ranking. Some search engines only look at the HEAD area while others look at the whole page to make sure there is a theme to the page.

2) Remember that the more relevant the page is to the keyword being searched, the better the more relevant the search engine results are, and the more people will use the search engine, which is why the search engine developers are continually tryiung to improve the algorithms they use.

3) Make sure you are linking to all the pages within your site, and ensure the link text contains the most relevant keyword of the page you are linking to.

Track your search engine ranking

You can get search engine software that will help you create optimized pages, monitor and submit your pages, and do everything for you automatically! Click here for more info.