About Search Engines
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Why can’t I get a high listing in a particular search engine?
When you type in a search term and the search engine brings up a list of sites, why doesn’t your site appear at the top of the list? A search engine is trying to give its users what they want and what they want is to be able to find exactly what they’re searching for. If they’re searching for dogs they don’t want cats. What users want is information that’s relevant to their search. To provide this the engine must produce a page that has the most relevance to that search term, followed by other pages in descending order of relevance. If your page doesn’t appear at the top then the engine has decided that it has less relevance to the search term than other comparable pages.
How does an engine return pages for a search term?A search engine has a database with lists filled with page addresses. Each list will relate to a search term which might be a word or a phrase. In each list the page addresses are ranked for relevance to that search term. When a user types in a search term, the engine produces the list of page addresses for that search term ranked in relevance. It may be more complex than this but this is the principle. |
How does an engine decide a page’s relevance to a search term?
A robot program, usually called a spider, works out relevance. When a web page is submitted, the spider scans the page and makes a list of the words, their position and how often they occur on the page (it ignores what are called "stop" words like "a", "and", "or", "the" etc). These words are called "keywords" and they are a key to the content of the page. The spider then uses these keywords to decide what the content of the page is related to (and it will be related to more than one thing) and uses this to store references to the page in the lists that are relevant to the content. A scoring system decides how high up the list of page references the page will appear depending on the page’s relevance to each keyword. The database holds millions of keyword lists therefore the page will be listed by relevance under a number of keywords. As an example, if your page had the word "paper" and the word "pencil" as keywords, then the page would be listed under "paper" according to it’s relevance as well as listed under "pencil" according to it’s relevance.How do I get higher up the list for a search term?
What some page authors do is create pages targeting a search term aimed at gaining a high relevance for a particular engine. The relevance scoring systems are different for each engine so it’s impossible to guarantee that a high listing for a particular keyword in one engine, will guarantee the same in another so they may create different pages for different engines. These pages are usually called gateway pages since they don’t normally form part of the site but are designed to rank highly and grab users’ attention and direct them to the main pages of the site.How can I increase page relevance to a particular search term?
If you knew exactly how an engine used relevancy for listing it would be no problem but of course they’re not about to tell you that, therefore the only way you can gain information is by looking at the pages that come at the top for that search term. Unfortunately just looking doesn’t tell you very much and so software exists to analyse pages for keyword relevance. These programs have a knowledge base gleaned from scanning high-listing pages and can formulate rules then apply them to your pages. This strategy may bring some success, however it’s an ongoing battle to stay on top since engines are constantly changing their methods, not to mention that other site owners are trying to stay on top as well.Are Metatag titles, descriptions and keywords important in listing?
It depends on the search engine but If Google is taken as an example then according to what they publish on their site, Metatag titles and descriptions are important but Metatag keywords are ignored. In fact Metatag keywords are considered less and less relevant nowadays. The original concept was that page authors placed the keywords in a metatag to help the search engine decide relevance but since this relied on the honesty of the page author, it has tended to fall into disrepute. Search engines can work out their own keywords by scanning the text in a page so why should they take an author’s word for it? Google uses both Metatag titles and descriptions in conjuction with the text in the page to work out relevance and hence page listing. If titles and descriptions don’t match the page content then this could be considered spamming (i.e. trying to fool users into thinking the page is about something other than it actually is). Whether you’re thinking about your listing or not, it’s obviously a good idea to think up a good page title and description since many search engines print these out in a search. The more concise, descriptive and relevant these are, the more likely a user is to be tempted to click through to your site.What is link popularity?
This refers to how many other web pages on the Internet are linked to yours. Google more precisely defines link popularity as how many "quality" pages are linked to yours and uses this to decide Page Ranking. Google considers "quality" web pages to be pages that are themselves linked to by other "quality" pages. Search engines like Google consider link popularity extremely important when deciding on a web site’s ranking. Therefore cultivating links from high ranking web sites to your own is clearly worthwhile.High page ranking is desirable but doesn't guarantee appearing high in listings since page relevance is also taken into account.
So what can be deduced from all this?
If a page has uncommon keywords, or keyword combinations, then it has a better chance of coming high up in a search because there will be less sites listed under that keyword. But of course if a page has uncommon keywords then less people are likely to search using those keywords so the page will have a smaller audience. This is pretty much as you’d expect, since it’s more likely that you’ll draw attention as a big fish in a small pool than a small fish in a big pool. Another lesson to be drawn is that the more pages you have on your site, the more chances there are of receiving hits from them since each page will be ranked under different keywords.What are pay per click search engines?
These aren’t actually search engines but online directories compiled by humans, as opposed to robots. The big advantage with pay per click is that you can guarantee your ranking but it will cost you. It works like this. The directory will have a list of search terms that sites are listed under. The sites will bid to appear in the list and the bid relates to how much it costs each time a user clicks through to a site. You start by paying a deposit, then you choose your search term (or terms). You then check the bids for the term and if you want to appear at the top you must outbid whoever is already at the top. If you want to appear half way down the list then you have to outbid whoever is in that position. Your site will then come up in that position on a search of the directory. If a user clicks through to your site, the amount you have bid is deducted from your deposit. If your deposit runs out, your site is suspended from the list until you top it up again. This wouldn’t be so attractive if the only place that listed your site was the online directory. However, most directories provide "feeds" to the better known search engines where they will normally appear above the engine’s own search results. They’re usually called "preferred listings" or "sponsored links" and normally only the first 4 or so sites from the directory’s list are displayed on the first page of results, with the next 4 on the next page of results and so on. Although pay per click can be expensive it delivers exactly what you need without the hassle of altering your pages to try and please the capricious nature of free search engines.© 2000-2010 smallbizonline website design Tel: 01501771106 Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions
