One of the big questions people like to ask about search engines like Google or Bing are how exactly they figure out how to rank your site. To explain better, it's best to start from the beginning:
A brief explanation of how search engines work:
The internet is so great because there are literally thousands (if not millions) of pages about any topic you could ever imagine. Unfortunately, this same fact can be a bad thing, because the internet is over-saturated with information irrelevant to what you may be looking for.
Thankfully, we have search engines. These are basically sites on the internet that allow people like us to find information from other sites around the internet. There are both human-powered directory sites as well as spider or crawler-based search engines, but I'm going to focus only on spider/crawler-based engines, like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.
These search engines all use different systems to calculate results, but they do have certain things in common. They all search the net based on important words (keywords or keyphrases), they keep indexes of these words and where they found them, and allow users to search for these keywords within these indexes.
Search engines continuously browse the internet using small programs commonly referred to as 'crawlers' or 'spiders'. These are directed from an index of URLS that need to be crawled.
The search engine then keeps a copy, or cache, of every web page that a spider or crawler scans. From this, a record of all the words from each page, as well as the URLs they were found on, are kept in a massive table.
When a user searches the engine, the most relevant search results are presented. These appear in order of their ranking, which is determined by a secret set of formulas. These are different for each search engine.
Although these algorithms are kept very secret, we can still determine the factors that influence ranking, as people are constantly experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn't. The main factors that influence search engine ranking are the number of times your targeted keyword appears in the body text of your site, and where. Other factors include using bold text, metatags, and "backlinks" from other reputable domains.
What's the difference between Organic and Paid results?
The biggest search engines deliver results for your search query in two different ways - Organic results, and Paid results. The organic results for a given search are the result of the process outlined above.
Paid results, however, is a model used by search engines that allows site owners to pay the search engine to guarantee their website will appear in search results. Also, this paid including might even influence the search engine spider to visit the site more frequently, and may give the owner the option to submit their information about the page more often. Search engines all treat these paid results in different ways. Some call these results advertisements, whereas others might describe them as simply other results alongside organic search results.
Search Engine Marketing:
Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the paid method of marketing your site, and increasing its ranking. This mostly means paying per inclusion or click (to appear in the 'paid' results as detailed above), banner ads, or other marketing methods that search engines may offer.
Search Engine Optimisation:
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of creating and designing your site to look more relevant to search engines, and therefore rank higher in organic results.
SEO might involve:
• SEO-based copywriting
• title and description tags
• not using material crawler's can't see, such as Flash content
• link building techniques, such as internal or external (backlinks)
• URLs optimised for SEO
• easily crawlable directory structure
• sitemaps, XML or otherwise.
Want to find out more about how search engines work? Visit here to find out the latest info on SEO and SEM for search engines.
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