Jul
29
The Stages That Search Engines Employ To Determine The Search Engine Placement Of A Site
Having a Search Engine Placement on the initial page of results of a related search can be the most useful form of Online Marketing for a company. If done cleverly it can reduce the necessity for any other forms of Online Marketing. In this article we will look at the factors search engines use to decide the placement of a web site in its results page, from the old search engines to the present day search engines.
In the beginning of the world wide web it was virtually impossible to locate any new web site, unless there was a link to it from a web site that was already known to you. It was not long until a solution to this situation was found and the search engine was launched.
Search engines are only useful if they consistently decide which web pages are relevant, compared with the parameters entered into the search engine. The surfer enters keywords into a search engine, these are words that they think are the most relevant to the items or services they are browsing for. In the early days of search engines they used fairly simple methods to decide the relevance of web pages. The search engines essentially counted the number of times keywords appeared on a webpage, and the more times they appeared the more relevant the web page was determined to be, and therefore the higher the Search Engine Placement the web page was allocated.
It was not long before search engine Optimization companies were introduced to take advantage of this method. Almost all of them abused the system as it was easy to do, many keywords were camouflaged on the webpage to raise its Search Engine Placement, often these keywords were not relevant to the webpage, but as they were camouflaged the visitors did not view them. The keywords were however entered in to search engines in vast amounts, therefore increasing the number of visitors to a web site. It was not long before the search engines noticed this and started punishing the websites that employed these methods.
Following that, the search engines made their methods for determining relevance a lot more complex, to make them more reliable and more difficult to abuse, as well as meta tag descriptions and meta tag keywords being added to HTML codes to make the search engines job easier.
The newer, more complex methods, to decide relevance of a web page, not only works on the number of times a keyword appears on the webpage, but also on where it appears on the web page. This is carried out by weighting the keywords, depending on where they are featured on a web page.
Again a Search Engine Optimization Company soon found out where to feature keywords to raise the Search Engine Placement of a web page. No one expected the search engines themselves to know the exact weights given to each position. This is a list of positions to place keywords in decreasing weight order, web address, web page file name, web page title, meta tag description, web pages H1 heading, web page H2 heading, any bold text, web page’s text and finally the file names and “alt” text of pictures.
This was the way search engines worked for some time until Google came along and added another layer to decide the relevance of a webpage, and therefore its Search Engine Placement. This was to add up the number of links that pointed to a web page, the more links the greater the Search Engine Placement it was allocated. The idea behind this was if people liked the web page’s contents they would want to share them with the planet by placing a link to them.
It was not long until a Search Engine Optimization Company became aware of this and proceded to add link building to its Optimization methods.