Search Engine Rankings: The Magic, the Science

Search Engine Rankings: The Magic, the Science

October 13th, 2009 → 7:56 pm @ Rune Risom // 3 Comments

When you search for something on the Internet using whichever search engine you prefer, the vast majority of the time you find what you are looking for really, really fast. You don’t have to dig through hundreds of pages of results looking for something remotely relevant. You won’t walk away mumbling to yourself about how hard it is to find information about why your car’s engine won’t run. You just type in your query, and the search engine immediately gives you a list of web pages about that topic. What sorcery is this?

While some of this magic is thanks to the wizardry of some talented people, most of it is actually due to the creators of these web pages writing relevant content in a way that boosts their search engine ranking. The criteria search engines use to determine a page’s search engine ranking are very simple.

Keyword Relevance

A web page about Italian restaurants in New York City is going to have the words “Italian,” “Restaurants” and “New York City” appear several times. When search engines scour the web for information (in this case, for information about fine dining in the Big Apple), they look for pages that have the exact terms you searched for. Higher priority is given to the title and the first couple of paragraphs, as any self-respecting webmaster would introduce his subject properly. How many times a given term appears on a page also affects its search engine ranking, with the pages appearing at the very top of the list usually having your search terms quite a number of times (We recommend 4-6 times depending on size of content).

Those are the first two bits of criteria a search engine uses the weight the relevance of a web page against any search. This is why you won’t get results about Chinese eateries in San Francisco or Mexican diners in New Orleans.

What else matters?

With most professional web designers out there completely aware of that, a multitude of pages are written specifically to boost their search engine ranking. With a lot of excellently written pages out there designed to attract as many viewers as possible, how do our magical search engines decide which are more relevant and therefore deserve a higher page rank?

The answer is “off the page” factors, which include things like how many other websites link to it, the words they use in the link, and click-through from the results list itself.

Related posts:

1. Search Engine Optimization Tool

Tags: keywords, ranking criterias, seo