How do search engines rank websites?
This is a question that many people have asked over the years. Search engines have become more and more complex on how they are updating their methods for searching (spidering) for websites and ranking them. They do this by crawling over a site to look at its content, images, and other pages attached to the main frame page of the website. There are many factors to play on knowing how search engines rank websites but we are going to concentrate on the main factors:
1. Inbound Links to your website - The more the better and the better those websites are ranking to you in terms of their page rank, the better your ranking will be. One way links known as inbound links are key to success, a lot of other marketers will use reciprocal links which is where you add a link to someone’s website and they link back to you. This method use to be very successful a few years ago but now the spiders (search engines) are catching up with this method of increasing your ranking and it is not as successful as it once was.
2. Your content and how unique it is - Search engines rank websites on their content, how much there is, how relevant it is to the keywords searched in the search engines and how unique it is. Uniqueness is very important because if they find information on your website which they find on other sites this can dramatically decrease your ranking.
3. How your content is displayed - Search engines rank websites on how their content is displayed, for instance which code you have used, in HTML which tags you have used, for instance <H> tags are heading tags and <STRONG> tags are a small portion of what tags you should be using for the search engines to find your website, the logic behind this is that if a search engine finds you putting something as a heading or as bold it believes it must be an important part of your website so pays attention to it.
4. Meta Tags - Meta Tags are a vital player when it comes to ranking on search engines. Without having the correct meta tags you could be wasting all of your time building inbound links to your website and making sure the content is unique, correctly formatted, and making sure there is plenty of it. Meta tags contain 3 important tags.
| 1. Title |
This is the title of your webpage |
| 2. Keywords |
These are the keywords that people are searching for on the search engines that you want to focus on |
| 3. Description |
This is the description of your website and the products/services it offers |
Also there are other tags which make the spider’s access to your website a lot easier.
5. Black Listing - This is where the search engine will black list your website if it finds that you are cheating to get a better ranking. For instance the term "Invisible Text", displaying text in a colour that can’t be seen, or displaying lots of information that is just for search engines and not for genuine users.
Copyright Web21k
By Sam Howell - 13th April 2007
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