How Search Engines Rank Web Sites

The purpose of the web site ranking is that it will deliver the web page at or near the top. Ideally, Rankings that appear in the top 11 will show the most relevant findings of the search. This is important, and anyone that wants their web site to appear, would want it to appear near the top, or no more than 2 pages from the top.

Many search engines will rank web pages according to certain criteria listed below are some of the criteria that influence web page rankings.

What is not indexed? Registration pages, text in graphics and multimedia files (use Alt tags), XML, Java applets, comment tags, Acrobat files, spammers, URLs with special characters, Frames, and pages with cookie requirements. So if your web page has these features, many search engines will penalize you by not indexing your web site. Some of these features are necessary to make your website run, but others are not. Consider. Some web designers will put special words in their pages, over and over again. Or make them invisible by painting the font to match the background. This is the work of spammers, and search engines have been programmed to ignore those types of pages. That is they may be picked up, but they will die before they are indexed. They don’t make it to the database.

Do slow pages play a role in the indexing? Yes definitely. If the server that the web site is sitting on is slow to respond, then the spider will not that and ignore it in the index.

What about content and location? This is very important, and as a general rule of thumb the key words should be at the top of the page. So Keywords should be close to each other. Content should include keywords in text or links. And the rank is also influenced as well as on the length of the document and frequency of keywords.

The HTML title is also important. It should be unique for every page, and it should be concise.

META Tags: This is mixed. For some search engines, like Google and Alta Vista this is Not important. But for others like Hotbot it is very important; both description (150 characters) and keywords (75 characters)

Keyword Frequency: If it is important, it should be at the top and also in the title. The frequency varied with some search engines like MSN where it can appear 4 to 12 times. But most other search engines, this is not. But bear in mind, that if you repeat key words, say dozens of times, then this recurrence does matter; it will get you blacklisted.

Link Popularity: In most instances, search engines consider this to be very important. This means if there are other sites linking to your web page, others will consider your link to be important. This improves your ranking.

What are the preferences? Different search engines have specialties that they go after. For example, Alta Vista looks for uncommon words, good navigation, plain HTML pages with text only, themes, inbound links and keywords in link text. Others, like Google, like to see concise and accurate descriptions and keywords, and choices of the appropriate category. Other strategies include keywords that are near each other, keywords in URLs and link text, themes as the subject being present throughout the site.

Doorway pages: These are pages specially optimized for one search engine and 1-3 keywords. They are also known as “gateway,” “bridge,” “entry,” “jump” or “supplemental” pages. Doorway pages stand on their own. They are separate from the rest of a site and may feature a logo, some text, and a link that encourages visitors to enter the site. These may be active participatory sites. They want your participation. If used effectively they can help your site rank high for any keyword in any engine. But they should be optimized for one keyword and one search engine and tailored to each engine’s specifications. Finally they should never be used for directories.

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