How Do the Search Engines Rank Websites?

Published: 15/01/2010
Category: Search Engine Optimisation


This article has been compiled to give you an insight into what determines your website’s ranking in the search engines. It is a complex subject and the criteria are constantly being changed due to the continually evolving algorithms that the search engines employ.

The benefit of being the first name your customer sees when searching for your product or service cannot be understated and whilst it can never be guaranteed, there are many techniques we can employ to give your website a boost in the rankings and maybe even that elusive number one spot!


Keywords

Keywords are the phrases that people enter into a search engine to find what they are looking for. Examples of this may be “hotels in Swindon” or “film reviews”. When you type in a search query like these, it is the search engine’s job to produce the most relevant results it can. Within your website you can specify the keywords that you think that your customers will use to search for you. This helps the search engine to match the search query to your website. The only problem is that there may be thousands of other websites that have specified these same keywords so the search engines needs a more thorough method of ranking them.


Popularity

Ultimately the simplest method of ranking websites is by their popularity, based on the number of unique visitors they receive. Not only that, the search engines are sophisticated enough to track how long a visitor stayed on your page, what information they viewed and how many times your page has been bookmarked or added into favourites. This all adds importance to your site.

This can however be a bit of a catch 22, obviously a high ranking will increase the volume of visitors you receive and a new website that is yet to be established in the rankings will struggle to get many visitors straight away.

Due to this conundrum it is not the only method the search engines use to rank websites but it can play a big part in it.

A well-managed online advertising campaign can be used to drive traffic to your website and even put you at the top of the rankings in the short term.


External Links

If lots of other websites are linking to yours then it suggests to the search engines that your website’s content must be of some value and relevance. Furthermore the more high profile the website is that links to you, the more it raises your status.

Therefore time spent adding your website to the listings of online directories, for example the Yellow Pages and Local Business Directory can be a very time efficient and effective method of improving your ranking. There are many other methods we employ when carrying out this process known as ‘link building’ with the objective being to make sure that your website is seen in all the right places, specifically those relevant to your industry.


Frequency of Updates and New Content

There are benefits to regularly updating your website and keeping the content fresh, not least to entice previous visitors to revisit your website on a regular basis. However it can also affect your ranking; regularly updated websites are seen as more active and more likely to be relevant, whereas websites that neglect to update their content are viewed as stale and out dated.


Current Trends

If your site is about skiing, the chances are that it will get more traffic during the winter. Therefore it would be difficult to maintain a good ranking all year round unless this was taken into account. Thankfully it is; seasonal trends are monitored by the search engines in order to prevent a fluctuation in the rankings at different times of year.

Furthermore current cultural trends and fads are monitored by the search engines on a daily basis and the search results are impacted by this. For example during the Olympics last year, any websites that made reference to the Olympics would have received a small boost in their ranking as they were perceived as being more relevant to what people will be interested in reading.