Section 2 - Knowing the Search Engines
Now you know how to make web pages for search engines, you will need to know a little about them.
The Aim of Search Engines
The aim of search engines is simple; they aim to provide the highest quality and most relevant results for a given query. If you keep this in mind with your website, you will have a good foundation for good rankings. However, a lot of competitive search terms are dominated by sites that are solely there through spamming. High quality is not necessary if you have enough money to pay an SEO company to spam you up the rankings. The search engines are trying their best to come up with new and better methods of filtering spam. So building a quality web presence will be far more effective long-term. If you spam your way there today, you may be gone tomorrow (not literally). There is always the possibility of being penalised or even removed from a search engine if you are caught seriously spamming.
There are four major search engines at the time of writing this article: Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. Just because you rank well on one, doesn't mean you will rank well on others.
Google is the most queried search engine. Estimates of their market share average at around about 65%. The most important factor for ranking in Google is the number, quality and text of incoming links. Because it is the must queried search engine, it is also the most targeted by SEOs. This doesn't necessarily mean that getting your site ranked on Google will be harder.
Yahoo is the second most queried search engine with around 20% market share. Ranking in Yahoo is more geared towards the content you have on your page. I find ranking in Yahoo for niche terms is much the same as in Google, but for more competitive terms Yahoo is often provides totally different results. You can rank at the top of page one all year on Google for a competitive search term, but be nowhere to be found on Yahoo.
MSN (Windows Live) is the third most used search engine with less than 10% market share. I find that if you rank well on Google you will often rank well on MSN. It is relatively easy to get pages to rank in MSN for niche terms with some good on-site optimisation and no incoming links.
Ask is the forth most queried search engine with about 4% market share. The largest factor in ranking on Ask is being linked to from 'authority sites'. Ask tries to determine the most authoritative sites by analysing the link structure between similar sites. To rank on Ask, you need to become a part of what are termed 'topical hubs' for your industry. Ranking in Ask for competitive search terms can be very hard if you have a purely commercial website, as authoritative tend not to link to commercial sites.
Remember that search engines have geographical differences. Google.co.uk won't have the same results as google.com.
What the Search Engines Are Looking For
When you used a search engine back in the advent of search all you would get is a list of web pages that have the same document name. As search engines have evolved, they have created more sophisticated methods of finding web pages that may be relevant to your search. Below is an ordered list of what search engines are looking for:
- Pages that contain the exact phrase
- Pages that have the keywords in close proximity
- Pages that have the keywords in any proximity
- Pages that have similar keywords, e.g. development and developer
Pages that have incoming links with the keywords as link text and pages that have the keywords in 'special tags' such as h1 are given an extra boost.
What Is PageRank?
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by Google. There are probably only a handful of people who actually know what the algorithm is as it currently stands. From my experience, I would describe PageRank as a numeric value assigned by a comparison of the number incoming links and the quality of those links. You can find out the PageRank of a site by installing the Google Toolbar, SEO for Firefox or other browser plugins. There are also a number of web based alternatives.
PageRank is somewhat over-hyped. I have had a PageRank 3 site rank up with PageRank 5 sites, I have had a PageRank 3 site with over 20,000 incoming links, but seen a PageRank 7 site with less than 1,000 links and I have had a PageRank 4 site with five links that didn't rank in the top 100 pages for a mildly competitive (but saturated) search term.
The best way to look at PageRank is as a site's potential to rank within Google. If you have a PageRank 4 site with 5 links that isn't coming up anywhere it is a very good basis. Whereas if you have a PageRank 2 site with 10,000 incoming links you've obviously gone wrong somewhere.
A lot of people are so fixated on PageRank they think that their site will only move in the rankings when their PageRank changes. In reality, your site could move in the search rankings every day. The only time your site will move in the rankings is when:
- Your site has been indexed
- Sites around your site in the SERPs have been indexed and moved position
- Your site has been penalised
If you monitor your site regularly for certain search terms, you will probably notice that it constantly shuffles up and down. This is due to your site and the site around it being indexed. The only instance you probably won't see this is when your site is massively stronger in the rankings than your competitors. To find out when Google last indexed your site click the cache link on your listing and it tells you the date of last index on the top line.
How Search Engines Rank Your Site
A search engine will visit your site and at the same time rank it. Although there may also be algorithms which are carried out globally. Exactly what the search engines do is a total mystery to everyone except the top dogs at the company. If the search engines divulged all their secrets, they would get severely spammed and loose control over the quality of search results.
Search engines treat each page within your site as a separate entity. Each page has its own individual value. Just because you are linking your site's homepage doesn't mean that all of the pages within your site will get the same benefits. So long as a sub-page within your site is linked to the page you are working on building incoming links to it will gain a ranking boost. In turn any page linked to from the sub-page will get a ranking boost, but as the chain goes on the boost will be weaker and weaker.
If you really want to get sub-pages in your site up the rankings, you need to get incoming links to that sub-page. If you have a URL with good rankings, a lot of quality incoming links, your sub-pages should be able to rank even for mildly competitive terms with no external incoming links to that actual page.
Checking Out The Competition
The best method for checking how competitive a given search term is on Google is to check the site's PageRank and the number of incoming links. You can check a site's PageRank by installing the Google Toolbar and check the number of incoming links by going to Yahoo and using the query: 'linkdomain:www.google.co.uk -site:www.google.co.uk' replacing Google with the URL you wish to check. There is also a much easier way of obtaining this information. First of all you will need to download Firefox. Next, download the SEO for Firefox plugin. This will give you lots of useful information about a website, including the PageRank and number of incoming links.
It is not as simple as getting 50,001 incoming links when the site at the top of the SERPs has 50,000, but checking out the PageRank and the number of incoming links of your competitors will give you a good idea of how much you will need to beat them. The number of incoming links you actually need to get depends on the methods you use. The more effort you put into building a quality link portfolio, the less links you will need to beat your competitors. A lot of sites out on the internet have spammed their way to the top. Spamming your way to the top will require more links than if you build quality links. So you may be able to beat your competitors with considerably less links. Also keep in mind that the purpose of the search engines is to provide quality results and spamming is not quality. If the search engines improve their ability to devalue spammy links, websites that have spammed their way up will see themselves fall in the rankings and websites with a quality link portfolio will reap the benefits. Realistically, there will not be much change in the coming years. Search engines face massive challenges in trying to reduce spam. As soon as they change things, people will find ways of getting around and exploiting their system.