How Search Engines Rank Sites?

Most people looking for something online normally browse through the first three pages of the search results from the search engines they use. This only suggests that websites wishing to reach as many of their target audience as possible have to work hard to attain high rankings in search engines. Being relevant to the requested searches of users is key.Search engines have been very helpful for web users looking for information on products and services as well as those who want to do trade online. Studies on internet usage have found that majority of people doing research on various topics use the search engines while about 37 percent used a top search engine to do online shopping.
The key factors
Early on, search engines ranked pages according to page content, formatting and content of metadata tags. Back then it was enough for webmasters to submit their sites and pages to search engines and even use bogus content including words repeated a thousand times in the body just to get a high ranking. But as the internet technology advances, search engines also get more complicated and stricter in ranking websites and pages. Now, relevance to a topic and some keywords are important factors to achieve a good ranking. The right keywords used by searchers should be there to enable your site or page to land in the top search results.Studies have also confirmed that searchers skim through a search results pace from top to bottom and left to right looking for a topic relevant to what theyג€™re looking for. The nearer a topic is to the top of the rankings, the greater will be the number of possible visitors to a certain website.
How the ranking process takes place?
The process of how a search engine ranks sites is called search engine optimization or SEO. This procedure involves an analysis of a siteג€™s coding, presentation, structure and content for easy indexing by search engine robots. It was in the mid-1990s when webmasters and content developers started the optimization of sites for search engines. Upon submission of a web page or site, search engines would then send a spider for crawling of that site, extracting of links to other pages and returning of information provided by the page for indexing. A search engine spider/crawler works by downloading a page and storing it on the search engine server where all information including links, keywords and their location will be indexed through a second program.Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN make use of crawlers to look for pages for their search results. These crawlers consider various factors when crawling a website or page. Depending on the location of the pages from the root directory of a site, not all pages will be indexed by search engines.Yahoo! has a paid submission service that can guarantee instant crawling of a site and inclusion in the database although not necessarily a high ranking in search engine results. Meanwhile, submission to the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project has to be done manually. Google, for its part, has its Google Site maps which can be used to create an XML type feed and submit sites for free to search engines. The XML site maps ensure that all pages are easily discovered.