Search Engines - Making our web page visible at top

Hi Everyone!!
 
Yesterday, I was having a discussion with one of my colleague on how to empower your web page to make it visible on the first page when searched from a search engine like Google. Just putting across my understanding on the same based on learning from several sources–
 
Search engine has always fascinated me in the way it searches across millions of pages, filter them and gives us the pages which we want. There is definitely a smart algorithm that does the background work.
 
Crawler-based search engines – This type of search engines use a process called Web crawling / spidering.  Such search engines (e.g. Google) create their listings automatically. They crawl (in literal terms) the web and then people search through what they have found. If we change our web pages, such search engines eventually detect the changes and that can affect how the web pages are listed. Details on web crawling could be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler.
 
Human-powered Directories – A human powered directory depends on humans for its listings. We submit a short description to the open directory for our entire site, or editors write one summary for sites they review. A search looks for matches ONLY in the descriptions provided. If we change our web pages, such search engines can not detect those and that can’t affect how the web pages are listed.
 
There are search engines which use both ways and are termed as Hybrid Search engines.
 
A Crawler-based search engine has actually 3 parts – first is obviously the Crawler which visits a web page, reads it, and then follows the links to other pages on the site. The Crawler/Spider returns to the site on regular basis to look for changes.  Second is - Index / Catalog which is like a giant book containing a copy of every page that crawler finds. Until a webpage is added to the Index, it is not available for searching through search engine. The last one is actually the engine software which actually ranks the searched pages based on the search criteria………… This is where we started our discussion that how to make our web page ranked at the top whenever anyone searches for some keywords.
 
Of course, there is some kind of algorithm used by search engine to determine relevancy. Exactly how a particular search engine’s algorithm works is a closely kept trade secret!!!!! But, there are some general rules which all these algorithms follow:
 
Location and Frequency – Go to http://www.google.co.in and type “Sequence.nextval deceive”, it will show the link to my blog which I wrote in August 2010. This rule in ranking algorithm considers the location of keyword on our web page. Since my blog’s title is “Sequence.nextval can really deceive you”, the engine assumes that the keyword appearing in HTML title tag is more relevant than others in body. So, location of the searched item on our web page is very important.
                The second factor is frequency of searched text on the web pages. 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. If any web page adds “Sequence.nextval deceive” text more than once in the title, I can bet that web page will be ranked above my blog.
 
Quality to qualify for location/frequency method – Some search engines index more web pages than others and some also index web pages more often than others. Search engines may also exclude some pages from their index, if they detect that those pages are spam. e.g.  A word can be repeated hundred of times on a page to increase the frequency and push the page higher in the listings. Search engines do keep watch for common spamming methods in various ways including complaints from their users.
 
Off the Page factors – These factors are those which webmasters can not easily influence. The search engines are intelligent enough to do analysis on how pages are linked to each other and can determine what a page is all about and whether the page is worth to be “important” and thus deserving a ranking boost. Also, it can use sophisticated techniques to screen out attempts by webmasters to build artificial links designed to boost their rankings.
                Another factor could be a measure of click through. This means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, and then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors.
 
There would definitely be other factors that affect the search process for different search engines, but I think these must be common to all.
 
That’s all for now!!
 
Feel free to provide your inputs. Thanks.
 
[This was posted on my official site on 11th Jan 2012 5:56 AM]

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