Since Google took the top spot for Internet searching from rivals Yahoo, the company has been very careful to issue guidelines; but also give very little away with regard to the '200 factors' which determine where your website will appear, for a search term.
Give Me Some Background Please
Back in 1998 the company Google launched, and already by 1999, was gaining popularity across the USA and in international markets. At that time, Yahoo was the Internet king and 53% of the global market started surfing from their site. Yahoo's approach was, and is, slightly different however, with their main page acting as a directory with a search engine tacked on. There were numerous other existing search engines too, with Alta Vista being the most well known - but that was already losing market share to Yahoo, despite being younger and offering a simple search interface. Google were essentially offering a similar product to Alta Vista, so the market conditions did not look too favourable for another company to enter the fray.
Why Was Google Different?
Google's main selling point was that it filtered more useful results from searches, from a very simple interface (type in the box, hit search). How exactly did it do that?
Up to this point all the search engines indexed sites - that is, they visited them with small pieces of software, took a snapshot of what information they contained and kept a record of that, so when someone performed a search, they would list the most useful pages, ranked in order. Engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo and many others used something called 'Meta Tags' to determine the relevancy of the content. These are small snippets of information kept on each page of a website. You can only see them if you right-click a Web page, select 'View Source' and search the HTML at the top of the document that opens. This meant that the site owners, were responsible for declaring what it was their sites were about. The main issue with this approach, is that it's open to abuse. In no time at all, sites were stuffing their meta-tags with the most popular terms (usually called 'KeyWords') and jumping straight to the top of rankings.
This was good for site owners, but bad for users legitimately searching for specific information. Google swept this practice away by employing two key strategies. The first was:
Ignore Meta-Tags
Google pays some attention to Meta-Tags - the Title and Meta-Description for example, but certainly does not rate a site's relevance based on them. It ranks according to what content you're displaying and how you present it. It analyses each page and makes it's own mind up regarding what it is your site is about (based on its own mathematical algorithms). There are certainly methods of increasing the relevancy of your site, to improve its listing - by looking at the frequency of keywords, but what you are effectively doing is streamlining and improving your content. The more original, effective and targeted your content - the better your ranking will be. Google makes owners of sites improve the quality, by offering a higher ranking for compliance. It's a far better system for searchers and a far better system for [legitimate] site owners. The second key strategy is:
PageRank
Google was founded on this principle. It's a mathematical technique for determining how 'useful' a site is by looking at the amount of inbound links it has, what the quality of those links are, and how relevant they are to the site. Suffice to say the mathematics is fairly impenetrable to those outside the field. In essence: it's roughly saying - PageRank is a number from one to ten, an inbound link from a high PageRank site (say an '8') into a low PageRank site (say a '0') will improve the PageRank of the receiving site (the one with zero PageRank) if the subject matter is related.
The upshot of this is, that the quality site is 'voting' for your site by linking to you. It will only do this if the information you have is valuable, therefore your site is likely to prove a better match for what the searcher is looking for.
Conclusions
There's a lot more to SEO than the information referenced here, as any SEO practitioner will tell you. This article represents a broad stroke. It stands to reason that Google will not confirm or deny any claims about how their engines work, since they are a business and no businesses give away their copyright-protected, trade secrets. Their goal is to return the most relevant information as quickly as possible and this approach not only ensures a better quality of service for its users - it ensures that the hardest working, most quality-conscious suppliers: rise to the top of the market.
SEO is about building sites that pay attention to the quality and relevance of their information. Decide who you want to target and make your site ideal for the kind of person you want to attract.
---------------------------
Patrick Seery
Paper Tiger Website Design
for Web development, CMS design, advice and Search Engine Optimisation.
Complex information,
delivered simply.
Free consultation and further articles, including illustrations, can be found at:
My Computing Blog.
Copyright © Patrick Seery
You have permission to publish this article electronically, in print, or on your web site, free of charge, on the condition that the author bylines are included, without alteration.
