Sunday, September 21, 2008

Search engines rank web pages according to the software’s understanding of the web page’s relevancy to the term being searched

Keywords

Search engines rank web pages according to the software’s understanding of
the web page’s relevancy to the term being searched. To determine
relevancy, each search engine follows its own group of rules. The most
important rules are


· The location of keywords on your web page; and
· How often those keywords appear on the page (the frequency)


For example, if the keyword appears in the title of the page, then it would be
considered to be far more relevant than the keyword appearing in the text at
the bottom of the page.



Search engines consider keywords to be more relevant if they appear sooner
on the page (like in the headline) rather than later. The idea is that you’ll be
putting the most important words – the ones that really have the relevant
information – on the page first.


Search engines also consider the frequency with which keywords appear.
The frequency is usually determined by how often the keywords are used out
of all the words on a page. If the keyword is used 4 times out of 100 words,
the frequency would be 4%.


Of course, you can now develop the perfect relevant page with one keyword
at 100% frequency - just put a single word on the page and make it the title
of the page as well. Unfortunately, the search engines don’t make things
that simple.

While all search engines do follow the same basic rules of relevancy, location
and frequency, each search engine has its own special way of determining
rankings. To make things more interesting, the search engines change the
rules from time to time so that the rankings change even if the web pages
have remained the same.



One method of determining relevancy used by some search engines (like
HotBot and Infoseek), but not others (like Lycos), is the Meta tags. Meta
tags are hidden HTML codes that provide the search engine spiders with
potentially important information like the page description and the page
keywords.


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