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Search Engine Ranking |
What Is Ranking? Ranking is the position of a web page in the list of search results. The first page in the list has a higher rank than those below it, the 10th page in the list has a higher rank than the 20th, etc. Getting your pages to appear at or near the top of the list when a search is conducted has become a complex subject. This is largely due to the fact that each search engine has it's own methods of indexing pages and it's own methods of ranking them. At one time the WWW economy was fueled by high paying banner ads and other forms of high dollar promotions. Today, advertising alone is no longer able to support the costs of maintaing a website or web service such as a search engine. Many search engines now charge a service fee or offer ranking plans. Relevancy Search for anything using your favorite search engine and almost nstantly, the search engine will sort through the millions of pages it knows about and present you with ones that match your topic. The matches will even be ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first. The search engines don't always get it right. Non-relevant pages make it through, and sometimes it may take a little more digging to find what you are looking for, but by and large, search engines do an amazing job. Imagine walking into a library and asking the librarian to show you books about Pets. That is a broad subject so the librarian will ask you questions to narrow down the number of books she can show you. You tell her that you are interested specifically about cats. She now asks you more questions to narrow down the search for what you would like to see because there are many different types of cats as well as books about all that is related to cats, including lions and tigers! Unfortunately, a search engine cannot ask you questions and it must operate a little differently than the librarian. So how do search engines go about determine relevancy? They follow a set of rules, with the main rules involving the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. In a library, the librarian needs to find books to match your request of "cats," so it makes sense that she first look at books with cat in the title. Search engines operate the same way. Pages with keywords appearing in the title are assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic. Search engines will also check to see if the keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning. Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. What You Can Do To Get Better Ranking 1. Get your own Domain Name. 2. Use keywords effectively. Ideally, the keywords that you use should also be on the page itself within some block of text. 3. Use keywords in the title of your page. Search engine spiders will look at the title of your page. They will rank your page based on the relevancy of the words you use. 4. Use a software program designed to submit your pages to search engines. A well known program is Web Position Gold. 5. Use a service such as Overture.com. |