How Search Engines Rank Websites

Great Google Tips!

Once you start to put some serious effort into search engine optimization, it becomes clear that some things you do have more effect on ranking than others. Naturally, the search engine companies like to keep their methods secret to preserve their ability to apply an automated, but objective, judgement on all of the pages in their index and to avoid having the search results artificially manipulated by unscrupulous search engine optimization techniques. Many factors have to be taken into consideration when a search engine does its ranking. Careful observation after many months of research and simple trial-and-error experimentation have led me to some broad conclusions. I present some of them here. Again, this information is biased for results on Google, but will generally hold true for all search engines.

Here's where to include keywords and phrases to enhance a page's search engine ranking for those terms (in approximate order of importance):

Once you have a page rich in content, you can start paying attention to incoming links to that page in general in terms of the issue of PageRank (Link Popularity). Check the incoming links to a given page by entering "link:http://www.yoursite.com/thepage.html" first into Google to find the number well-ranked links that search engine sees. Google only displays a non-weighted sample of the links it knows of, so you don't need to pay attention to the actual pages shown to be links. Just note the number of links it says it has seen. Then, once you have the Google results, enter the same "link:" command into Yahoo! and MSN Search to find all of the links pointing to the site (Yahoo! seems to aggregate links by domain for their "link:" command results). Keep a record of the number of links each of these search engine shows for your site so that you can track your progress over time.