The Process That Search Engines Adopt To Determine The Search Engine Placement Of A Web Site
Having a Search Engine Placement on the initial page of results of a relevant search can be the best form of Online Marketing for a business. If done strategically it can decrease the need for any other methods of Online Marketing. In this article we will analyze the factors search engines use to decide the placement of a site in its results page, from the original search engines to the present day search engines.
In the beginning of the internet it was virtually impossible to locate any new site, unless there was a link to it from a site that was already known to you. It was not long until a solution to this issue was found and the search engine was born.
Search engines are only useful if they consistently decide which web pages are related, compared with the parameters typed into the search engine. The searcher types keywords into a search engine, these are words that they reckon are the most related to the goods or services they are searching for. In the early days of search engines they used quite basic techniques to decide the relevance of web pages. The search engines basically calculated the number of times keywords appeared on a web page, and the more times they appeared the more related the web page was considered to be, and therefore the higher the Search Engine Placement the web page was allocated.
It was not much time before search engine Optimization companies were created to take advantage of this technique. The majority of them abused the system as it was straight forward to do, many keywords were hidden on the web page to raise its Search Engine Placement, often these keywords were not associated to the web page, but as they were hidden the visitors did not notice them. The keywords were however typed in to search engines in large numbers, therefore raising the number of visitors to a site. It was not long before the search engines noticed this and started penalizing the sites that adopted these techniques.
Further to that, the search engines made their techniques for determining relevance much more sophisticated, to make them more consistent 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 more simple.
The newer, more sophisticated techniques, to decide relevance of a web page, not only works on the number of times a keyword appears on the web page, but also on where it appears on the web page. This is achieved by weighting the keywords, depending on where they are featured on a web page.
Again a Search Engine Optimization Company soon discovered where to show keywords to raise the Search Engine Placement of a web page. No one predicted the search engines themselves to be aware of the exact weights given to each position. This is a list of positions to place keywords in descending 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 lastly the file names and “alt” text of pictures.
This was the way search engines operated for some time until Google came along and added a further layer to decide the relevance of a web page, and therefore its Search Engine Placement. This was to add up the number of links that pointed to a web page, the higher number of links the better the Search Engine Placement it was allocated. The thought behind this was if people liked the web page’s contents they would want to share them with the world by putting a link to them.
It was not long until a Search Engine Optimization Company became aware of this and began to add link building to its Optimization techniques.
