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Demystifying Search Engine Algorithms

Web search engines are large beasts with teams of experts working on improving their indexing, sorting and outputting of results. In fact, search engines predate the Internet as computers were originally created to store, sort and search through huge amounts of documents. But nothing came close to the sheer volume of data now available online. As such, search engines are ever evolving and always looking at ways to improve results. Google is currently leading the way in this space but there is no telling if and when this will change in the future. It is a constant struggle between search engines trying to improve and at same time close loopholes exploited by spammers and search engine marketing professionals trying to use legitimate methods and tools to rank higher by the same search engines. All of this has to do with the evolution of the search algorithm. As search algorithms are in constant state of flux so are the SEM and SEO efforts.

Now, the way a search engine interprets all the page data it has stored in its index is what is known as the search algorithm. An algorithm is basically a set of commands or code used to parse data. Each search engine has its own algorithm, which can be very large in itself, and, as such, each search engine outputs results in different ways. So a top 10 result on Google may or may not be in the top 10 on Yahoo or Bing (Microsoft's search engine).

In this article we won't go into technical detail on how search engine algorithms work. You don't need to know this unless you want to build your own search engine and besides, no one really knows. Those are trade secrets, and even within one search engine company there are teams of specialists so who knows if there is one person that actually knows all the ins and outs of a given search algorithm. But what we will delve into is how what you do can have an impact on a search algorithm and thus your site's rank.

Different search engines rate and weigh criteria differently. This explains why search results vary from one search engine to another. Here are the basic criteria that effect how a search algorithm will rank a site:

Keyword location - Keywords in titles, headings, alt tags, and in the body of the Web page have optimum impact.

Keyword frequency - There is a fine line between high frequency and keyword spamming. Don't miss opportunities to use keywords in the Web page but don't fall into the trap of "keyword stuffing" or "keyword spamming".

Incoming links - The more links that point to your website from other sites, the better impact on search positioning. The incoming links should be from quality websites and not from merely link sites. The quality of the website with the incoming link is considered important.

Outgoing links - Likewise, if you have outgoing links to relevant and quality websites related to the keywords you are targeting, this too is weighed in the ranking.

Click-throughs - Some search engines measure the number of click-throughs to sites as a way of measuring if visitors like the site or find it useful. This can impact the way a search engine positions a site in the future.

Social media - More and more search engines rely on the comments and linking from personal pages on social media or network sites to rank websites higher or lower.

In the future we will discuss in more detail how each of the above criteria can be correctly leveraged to get higher ranking.