Struggling with Search Engines

While getting registered with a search engine is fairly simple, getting good placement in the search engine is another matter. The more specific a search word or phase is to your web site, the better the chance it will appear close to the top. The more general the term, the less likely your page will be listed. This is why, when using your specific company name in quotes (a very specific phrase), your listing will usually appear at the top of the search results list, whereas general phrases like "design services" or (in our case) "web developer" aren't likely to list our site. There are just too many pages out there that we're competing with for top placement.

So how do the search engines determine which sites go to the top, and which sites are buried hundreds or thousands of pages down? The goal of any search engine is to provide the most relevant search results based on search terms. The more relevant the results, the more useful the search engine is as a tool and, by extension, the more people will use the search engine (and the more money they will make through advertising). Search engines use many different formulas for determining the relevance of any given site in their database for specific queries. Matching a keyword on a page with a keyword in a query is one of the most basic ways of determining relevance, but there are many others as well. The number of times the word is found on the page, whether the word is in the title tag as well as the body copy is another. The size in which the word is displayed is another variable in determining relevance, for example if the word is big, like in a heading tag, then the search engine would assume that it must be an important word and therefore give it more weight in its calculation of relevance.

There are things you can control on your site that will help maximize the relevance of your pages to a search engine's results. However, there are also things that are out of your control.