Many people wonder, “How do I get to the top of Google?”
The answer to that question is really “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO), but to understand why SEO works, you need to understand how search engines work.
First, many search engines, like Google, have a program called a spider (or crawler or bot) whose sole purpose is to crawl the web in search of web pages and links to more web pages. Before leaving a web page, the spider records all of the significant words for future reference. You can see when a spider visits your web site in your web traffic statistics. Google’s spider’s name is Googlebot.
Second, Google must organize all of the data found by its spider. It does that by creating an index. It keeps track of which words appear in which documents. Obviously, it needs A LOT of computers to do that. In fact, Google maintains several data centers to keep track of web sites and serve up search results. Over 500 computers help with each and every search query in order to return results in half a second. Pretty amazing!
Third, once Google knows which pages contain words from a given search query, it must order the results so that the most helpful information is at the top of the list. It does that by determining two things:
Reputation depends on the quality of inbound links, or links from other web sites pointing to your site. If those other sites are highly reputable and important, Google will believe that your site is, too. Both quality and quantity count for inbound links, although a few very important ones will outweigh several less important ones.
Relevancy depends on the content of your web page. The search engine deems keywords (from the give search phrase) more important if they appear in key places on the page, like the title, main headings, anchor text, and near the top of the page. Other important areas include Keyword and Description metatags and image ALT attributes, although these last ones are more important for your users than the search engine spiders. It also matters how the keywords appear in relation to one another and how often they appear on a page. A web page which contains words from a search phrase more often is probably more relevant for that particular search.
So that, in a nutshell, is how Google works. For the official explanation, see "How Does Google Collect and Rank Results?” by Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google.
Please submit any questions or comments on this article to Debbie at Blue Spider Creations.
